Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

Sonic Youth style tunings aren't generally useful for fingerpicking styles where you're doing a bassline and melody on one instrument, and fingerpicking style tunings aren't generally useful to get the dramatic shifts in tone and texture of a noisy band.

Given that I think the best proof that what you say here is wrong are the very examples you use to argue for this point -- SY and Fahey -- I think I'll just leave you to your ears.

There are weird tunings, and then there are WEIRD TUNINGS. Like the kind that distress your guitars and break strings and stuff. Most bands don't go that far.

Yeah, I do think tunings like F#F#GGAA go further than the tunings that Jimmy Page or Joni Mitchell used (and are related to the deliberately inexact approach to tuning mentioned above; when e.g. you tune in not-quite-unison pairs, it is easier to have beat tones ringing every time you strum open strings.)

When I played in Branca's 13th btw, he asked us to bring our cheapest guitar and specified string gauges (I think I had 2 low Es, 2 middle Es, 2 high Es?)

Right, the tunings are designed to create weird, dissonant overtones.

barely anyone covers SY but i don't know — because the tunings/overtones would be tough to re-create, it might be interesting for people to just try out the songs in different forms/modes ... (my high school band played "silver rocket" in standard tuning)

Some of the Sonic Youth guitar pics will have the string gauges on the back of the headstock if you match it up to the song/tuning that guitar was used on.

Nels Cline did a nice big band version of "Snare, Girl" on Lovers.

People sometimes slag off their 'tuneless' singing, and I'm not going to make any great claims for their vocal chops, but it did occur to me some time ago that it would be a lot harder to sing 'in tune' over dense chords of detuned strings than over idk "Amazed" by Lonestar.

Danish guy plays about 150 acoustic, instrumental Sonic Youth covers:

http://www.youtube.com/user/nvanliforp/videos

Oh yeah, I linked him a year ago. (I thought he was from Chile then, for some reason.) A lot of it works, esp later material.

This one immediately came to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crcc42h5Ouc

Not this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkvbWzRes6w

"Mildred Pierce," which again is literally the only song afaict in virtually the entire catalog that is in standard but ... probably doesn't need to be, because they're just making noise while the bass carries the hook?

I don't think this is accurate btw. The guitarists play fairly straightforward punk/postpunk riffs (and even do that triplet figure) for the whole thing until the last 30s. The power chords do sound pretty 'normal' compared to how SY usually play open fifths imo.

I might be able to scan some of those pages from the Aug 91 issue w TM on the cover later on btw. I finally found a copy a little while ago after some searching.

I am a man of my word, if belatedly: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18it36EojywZqYd1mbwjQIzAwYpG-ifOq/view?usp=sharing

The transcriptions are on the last three pages. The interview, on the first six, is pretty good: they discuss how their backgrounds with art school and working with Branca and Chatham influence their compositional approaches, their extended techniques, and Joe Satriani's admiration of them, among other things.

Nice, thanks for the scans Sund4r.

Np, hope you enjoy

How I'd rank'em tbh.

can someone explain to me the love that A Thousand Leaves receives?

i didn't get it when it was released, and i still don't get it today--- though i admit to liking the Ranaldo joints from that record.

the rest of it sounds like the worst sort of overindulgent guitar noodling. and the "Hits of Sunshine" track is fucking insufferable.

okay, so maybe not all of it— just looking at my copy, i realize there are some great tracks on it.

i think it's more that the record is praised for the moments that i find most boring— oh great, thurston's using a wah pedal again!— and not for the parts that seem more energetic.

duuude I was just talking with someone last week abt how this was their fave, and both of us raved abt Hits OfSunshine. So loose, trippy, and zoned, with Steve Shelley gluing it all together. My favorite post-Washing Machine track of theirs.

murray st and goo are definitely good-to-great. mostly great

Murray St is up there with Daydream Nation and Bad Moon Rising in my SY Top 3

re A Thousand Leaves: "Sunday," "Hits of Sunshine," and especially "Hoarfrost." The Gordon tracks are the weakest, actually.

"Female Mechanic Now on Duty" & "Karen Koltrane" are my picks from a 1000 leaves

Sunday, Wildflower Soul, Snare Girl are my top 3. French Tickler is nuts in a good way, too.

EVOL > sister > daydream nation as a trilogy is their peak. dirty and goo close behind for pop merit. everything else i wouldn't bother with now.

i think I prefer Goo to Evol and Washing machine to Dirty but yeah basically.

i think it's more that the record is praised for the moments that i find most boring— oh great, thurston's using a wah pedal again

hahahahah! Honestly, I think of Sonic Youth in terms of songs I like and songs that are ok and songs that are boring, rather than "which is the best album"

Top 3

Sister
Murray Street
Dirty

I have never understood why there is so much hostility to NYC Ghosts & Flowers. I love its sparseness, which is almost (almost) funky at times. Do people hate it because of the cheese/pretension of Thurston's and Lee's "poetry"? Because to me that's part of what SY is, and I love it for its corniness.

Lee's title track on that album is one of my SY favourites

"Free City Rhymes" is great imo, up there among their best. I do think the live versions of the songs from that album came together better than the recorded versions. Thurston's lyrics are particularly corny on "Renegade Princess" and "Small Flowers..." and the arrangements really foreground them. I think it was a pretty interesting attempt to integrate the ideas they'd been working with on SYR3 and SYR4 with their more song-based work. Overall, I'm not sure it was as successful as either those projects or the two 'song' albums that came afterwards but I don't hate it by any stretch.

Glad to have a little back up. Yeah I just listened to it yesterday and really heard the SYR records in them. I admit I was so annoyed by the discourse about Murray Street (redeeming the "disaster" of NYC Ghosts & Flowers) that I never really got into it. But I'll give it a spin today.

Saw then on on NYC Ghosts tour at the Troc in Philly right after Joey Ramone died. It was a great show, as were all the ones from this era.

I've always dug NYC Ghost & Flowers, I never thought it was their best record or anything but I've always been confused by the prevailing take of "oh it so obviously a terrible mis-step", plus yeah they were so great live when this album came out, the best I had seen them in a while.

It got decent reviews outside of Pitchfork, for the most part (and diCrescenzo has since recanted):

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/nyc-ghosts-flowers-190312/
https://books.google.ca/books?id=AlN-17xfY88C&pg=PA149&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.metacritic.com/music/nyc-ghosts-flowers/sonic-youth (the aggregate score is really pulled down by the 0 from Pitchfork; reviews are fine otherwise)

That diCrescenzo review is a classic of the genre, really one for the ages

These 40+ year olds continue to operate under the perception that they matter

re A Thousand Leaves: "Sunday," "Hits of Sunshine," and especially "Hoarfrost." The Gordon tracks are the weakest, actually.

I feel like one of the issues with Gordon’s tracks on ATL is that they come after Washing Machine where the little girl blues vibe of her tracks feels like the most perfectly realised manifestation of her schtick. By comparison the riot girl/ beat junkie meanderings on ATL feel... meandering. But I imagine Gordon may have felt that she had painted herself into a corner with WM.

re: alfred's list

i can't be the only one offended by the ranking of the eternal over confusion is sex.

SYNTAX FREE, TIM CAN'T CATCH MEEE

Saw then on on NYC Ghosts tour at the Troc in Philly right after Joey Ramone died. It was a great show, as were all the ones from this era

I don't remember this— I saw them on the NYC Ghosts tour in 2000 at the old Electric Factory, Stereolab opened and just blew SY out of the fucking water. I was 15 so remember it very, very well. i especially remember the two dudes in front of me eating some mushrooms and just *bopping* throughout the Stereolab set, something which I am now proud to say that I have also done.

blew them off the stage, so to speak?

There was a leg of that tour in the Spring of '01--I saw them in Austin.

interesting. had no idea.

Wait, Stereolab and Sonic Youth didn't play together in Austin in 2001, right?

I reacall seeing them separately at La Zona Rosa and Stubb's.

http://www.mtv.com/news/820973/sonic-youth-to-tour-with-stereolab-between-releases/

They played together at (the SY curated) ATP LA in 2002.

I don't remember any opening act on that tour in Montreal.

Cavernous Electric Factory would be a much better venue for Stereolab than Sonic Youth.

I saw the Stubb's show (also under the influence of mushrooms) and it was Curt Kirkwood doing a solo set before SY.

^^Yeah. Sorry for any confusion.