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Originally Posted by noisereductions
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
1982, When I was 18 or 19 I realized that Sonic Youth was my favorite band ever. I went crazy tracking down all their albums. And this - their debut - took me over a year as it was out of print and I was determined to find them all without resorting to the internet. This one was out of print but I finally found it in a shop in Boston for $25. It was worth every penny. "The Burning Spear" is a brilliant way to begin a career with it's dubby bass line, electric drill and opening manifesto of "I'm not afraid to say I'm scared." "I Dreamed I Dream" is amazing. It is a slow beautiful dirge with Lee and Kim doing a rare duet. "She Is Not Alone" is near tribal. This record just came out of nowhere and created the blueprint for an incredible career. Though it was only five tracks (with the band still insisting it was an album), it was finally put back into print in 2006 with a second half that featured the earliest live recordings officially released by the band. This is just excellent.
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I found what I later realized was a bootleg version of this at a used record store in Vancouver in, like, 1999. It was enough at the time though. Listening to the official re-release was kind of a revelation. I realized "I Dreamed I Dream" was one of my favorite Sonic Youth songs. It's definitely different (Richard on drums and whatnot) but I think it's a good first step.
I actually didn't realize the band "insisted" it was an album. Really seems more EP to me, so that's how I think of it. I conisider Bad Moon Rising to be the band's true, full-length debut. But there's a lot to love about this release. It's definitely primitive, and almost, like,
primordial sounding -- like you can hear the band crawling out of some oozy Cretaceous pit and moving slithering its way toward proper evolution. Sort of like Swans in that respect.
There are some reggae influences, and the entire sound of the thing is just really clean and normal sounding compared to what came next, but I still think it's an essential part of the their discography, and I don't really get why it sometimes gets a bad rap from critics.
I remember it was on a Rolling Stone list of "worst first albums by great bands" or something, and I would never categorize it as such. That's not just because I don't think of it as an album, but I honestly think it sews the seeds of the sound that would develop very well, and it places SY firmly in the Sonic context of the NYC no-wave scene, which they were certainly a part of.
Anyway, good shit. I don't listen to it often, but I probably listen to it more than Confusion is Sex.
Things didn't really fully gell until Bad Moon, but this is a necessary piece of the puzzle. I'm so glad they reissued it.