bettin on the POLL in the heather: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star

'Sweet Shine' is probably up there with the best Cocteau Twins songs which resonate profoundly in my soul even while I readily admit that I have no clue what the singer is going on about.

"Sweet Shine" IS good. One of maybe 4 tracks in the "reasons to keep this CD" column back when I sold it within months of release.

sounds like a sketch-level architectural model of a possible sonic youth album, made of tongue depressors and styrofoam, displayed under unforgiving flourescence.

OTM!

listening to this for the first time in a long time thanks to this thread. surprised skink got no votes, that's a primo kim song. self-obsessed and sexxee is pretty bad

SY’s “New Jersey.” lol

That makes a certain kind of sense.

I never liked this one really. "bull in the heather" was a weak single from it that i didnt even buy the album when it came out and i was such a big fan of them.

I listened to it recently though and I dug it, theyre definitely aiming for something different here even if it doesn't always work.

it feels a little thurston-heavy to me ... like he sings a lot of the songs and also sings a lot on those songs

This album is possessed with an aimless, raucous melancholy that I find inextricable from my dishwashing job at a pizza place where I first listened to the cassette on an endless loop.

WOO
I'M CUMIN HOOOOOOME

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, August 18, 2012 3:52 PM

just got a vinyl copy of this from a friend

wow I have not listened to this album in 20 years, and I’ve listened to the records before and after pretty regularly

I only caught up with this record this year. The only two songs I would have voted for got no votes: "Skink" and "Doctor's Orders". Other than on the opening track, Thurston Moore is sullen both vocally and compositionally.

my least fave of their '90s run easily

still really great

It's all about Kim's songs imo. Like it was just an EP of the tracks with her vocals it'd be pretty much their best album (if not exactly representative of their sound in general).

Whoever does the little 'all your dreams will come true' bit from 'Quest for the Cup' sounds eerily like my gf at the time the album was released. It kinda blew my mind when I first heard it. So I probably have an irrational emotional attachment to that one. But I'd still rep for the rest.

kim totally carries this album you're right

The band supposedly joked that they'd recorded over the masters for "Sister" to save tape costs -- which sounds silly at first, until you really, really crank "Jet Set" up... you can actually hear "Sister" played in its entirety underneath the album!

Am I being trolled? I'm being trolled.

(from: http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/lp/lp10.html)

If you turn it up even louder you can still hear the remnants of Sonic Death under the traces of Sister. They were nothing if not thrifty.

Yep, this is totally what comes to mind as "the Kim record". Love it so much, it was the first contemporary new SY record after I got into them. Heady days getting this album and then all those DGC reissues not too long after, for the latecomers like myself.

Brb, will experiment and report.

xp

P.S. Am I trolling you? I might be trolling you. I think you just got punked, pomenitul.

Nonsense, I can *totally* hear it now. And you can't – ha ha ha!

this has never been one of my faves but i'm listening to it now and enjoying it. i do think the kim songs are better but the thurston songs aren't bad. mostly it feels like thurston is trying to do something different (more stripped-down/"rock"?) while everyone else is like "OK thurston whatever" and doing standard (good) sonic youth songs. though "bull in the heather" does fit in with the more stripped-down/"rock" aesthetic of "screaming skull"/"self-obsessed and sexxee"/"androgynous mind"

this was marketed like their lo-fi/DIY album IIRC?

According to that Sonic Youth website, "Skink" was originally known under the title "Pete Townshend". I guess the opening riff sounds a little like a minor key variation on "Amazing Journey"?

Sweet Shine is maybe top 10 of the tracks I really wish Spotify had a "radio edit" of (or a feature to add a fade to a track in your playlist) and probably at some point i will upload an edited mp3 so I can add this to a playlist of sullen/moody 90s rock i'm making this week.

i guess if the album were more popular then a double disc reissue would have come out moving the hidden track to a separate index, but probably there weren't enough b-sides/compilation tracks/demos, as the whole album sounds like demos anyway (which suits it).

I like all of their studio albums to at least some degree but this and The Eternal are the two I like least.

Which do you like best?

I probably put on Sister most often?

My man.

I love this album. Who will join me?

Re-listening now. I bought it when it was new and liked it, but I may have overrated it after my fire-of-a-thousand-suns hatred of Dirty. "Winner's Blues" is a terrible album opener, that's for sure.

I like what I’ve heard of this album a lot more than dirty or washing machine

Yeah, after listening to it in full for the first time in quite a few years, this is easily the best 1990s SY album.

"Winner's Blues" is a terrible album opener, that's for sure.

dude, WHAT

When I haven’t heard it for a while I forget about this album and that I dig it

dude, WHAT

Never open your album with a slow boring song. They should have opened with "Bull in the Heather" and stuck "Winner's Blues" at the end of Side One, right in between "Self-Obsessed and Sexxee" and "Bone."

In its way it’s the most easily digestible album of theirs that decade, certainly

Too much Kim on this one. If I had to choose I’d go with screaming skull or sweet shine

I remember using an acoustic guitar was a huge deal at the time

I think it's a terrific opening track choice

No Lee song!

^ yeah why

Is this the album where he got pissed and almost quit for that reason(?)

Maybe he didn’t like being the “trash” member of the band. Or was that Thurston

Trash, won't pick it up, take them lights away...

this album came out at the tail end of three insane months. it's absolutely wild that crooked rain X2 was released on valentine's day 1994, kurt cobain goes the hemingway three weeks later, and then the next month after that, pavement's canonicity was already so in process that it turns out kim based SY's biggest "hit" (?) on bob nastanovich's horse-betting antics ("betting on the bull in the heather") (. . . this last bit at least according to thurston's recent memoir)

i think of this album (and the next two, really) as partof a transitional work for them and the start of the calmer, jammier, possibly even better nu-youth that would finally materialize on murray street (an obvious crowd fav) and beyond.

def a solid sy 90s alb tho. works really well as a full listen. otherwise, i like "sweet shine." (+"bull in the heather" but like, duh)

This one + Psychic Hearts (in ’95) are peak SY for me. Didn’t Butch Vig say the band was going for more of an “indie rock” approach? They got me!

This record seems to be a somewhat forced attempt at leaving the commercially acceptable Alternative sound of the previous record, but a lot of it comes across as crabby; as if they know what their new audience wants, but it's enough just to deny them without putting something substantially new in the place of the rejected musical directions. They'd start to grow naturally on the subsequent records.

Is this the album where he got pissed and almost quit for that reason(?)

no that was Dirty, over "Genetic" being left off the album proper

this has always been my least favourite SY album

I think this is the sy album I've been playing the most often in the last couple of years.

The second SY album I bought upon release (the first was Dirty). In the interim I’d been coping whatever earlier reissues DGC was producing, on tape, because this was when you could still do that

This was the second sonic youth album I bought (after Dirty, though both were bought in 1996 or 1997). I didn't seek it out, I think I just happened to find it used relatively cheap. I remember being a bit disappointed by it compared to Dirty, though I still listened to it a lot since I only had probably between 30 and 40 cds back then. Sonic Youth didn't become a favorite band until I heard "A Thousand Leaves", after which I went back and bought all previous albums.

Slowly over time though, this album has gone up in my estimation, it would probably be a top 5 SY album for me now.