lisa b

Amen Fire

If the Wasteland album is accomplished, that shouldn't surprise anyone. Enough people have heard I-Sound and DJ Scud music over the years: the former most famously in collaboration with To Rococo Rot and from his own labels Transparent and Full Watts, the latter from his own label Ambush and perhaps the new retrospective on Rephlex. The surprising part isn't how good the music is, really. Nor how distinctive and original it is, either. I guess the surprising part is that it's all of these things at the same time; fully-formed with a maturity beyond the youthful years of the artists themselves, incorporating an impressive array of influences into a completely fearless creature with its own life force. This record doesn't just take you there, it lives on its own planet. A bubbling, sliding, breathing space inhabited entirely by machines that are constantly evolving into something even more beautiful and deadly than they already are. Wasteland is an inescapable groove lined with the most fearsome sounds, creating a kind of concrète dub jungle. Perhaps intimidating to ears accustomed only to softer tones, it is nonetheless purposeful and tightly controlled, and powerful as a result.

Murray Street

If you were a martian and I was trying to explain the significance of the music of Sonic Youth to you, perhaps Murray Street isn't the first album I would pick out for you to listen to. But the back catalog is context and that's what brings us here now.

Perhaps initial listens of this record bring to mind how it doesn't strike you nearly as much as initial listens of Daydream Nation or Sister or even Goo did. But let's recall that this band has been around for over twenty years now and Goo was ten years ago, and which of us thinks we are or even wants to be the same person/ entity we were ten years ago? Thank goodness that this band recognizes the need for change and growth while retaining a firm grasp of their identity. Murray Street is more "classic" Sonic Youth than any of their SYR output (their own label and home to their, er, more difficult music) and what you might initially think is a lack of dynamic bombasticism would probably reveal itself to be restraint. Maybe the reason for this is the addition of "fifth Beatle" Jim O'Rourke (this is the first full album incorporating O'Rourke completely). It's hard to say what his input may have been musically (it's easy to imagine the same songs happening without him), but he produced the album as well and so shaped the entire feel, completes the sound, including the restraint. Not to say they don't take it there, because they always do, but now the road is so familiar they are stopping to examine with critical attention how they get there. That wall o' noise not just for the sake of noise; crescendo and climax, purposeful interlocking guitar parts.
So Youth-y, but more mature. Yeah, probably -- but having kids, losing some of your most valued material possessions, and even glimpsing your own mortality can do that to you.

So, to any extra-terrestials reading this, this band has proven themselves in so many ways and they have not failed us now. I can see how they got here, not having lost anything along the way, I look forward to where they are going, and I'm glad they dropped us a line from where they were.