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

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.

lol, I almost posted verbatim several things about this album that I'd already posted upthread. Good to see that some things never change.

But I will reiterate that it's all about the Kim songs. Luv.

Easily the best Sonic Youth show I ever saw was on the Washing Machine tour where they were still playing songs from this album - in my case Bull in the Heather, Skink and Starfield Road - they were so good that night, the sound was beautiful and clear and I felt like that was what I always hoped a SY live show would sound like

(I also saw them twice on the Dirty Tour - good but not great? - and once when they played Daydream Nation in full which was a pretty boring experience for them and me I reckon)

The terseness and precision of the tracks sound like a Stevensian farewell to an idea: in many ways the most severe SY listen of the early '90s.

Imo this was the big conceptual reset a la Young Americans that made their more conventionally jammy later mode. I feel like a lot of the stuff on MS for example are like what would happen if you took EJSTNS songs & blew them up to about 300% their og length/scope

(*its a bit of erm a stretch but I do think, say Tokyo Eye does kinda map onto Rain on Tin. Same wrt Skink & Sympathy for the Strawberry etc)

(Bone maps out onto SftS, not Skink, duh)

Always have a soft spot for this one, as it was the first "new" SY album I was able to pick-up on release. Obviously I was late to the game already at that point but, hey, I was not yet 18 when it was released and had been in a cultural wasteland before I got away to college. I just thought they were the closest band ever and it was a good time to get really into them - shortly after this came out you had the DGC reissues getting the back catalog in shops, the Made in USA soundtrack, the Confusion is Next book and then Washing Machine hit which, at the time, was my favorite album ever (I even had the blue Washing Machine t-shirt from the cover!).

Never open your album with a slow boring song. They should have ...

i agree with morrisp (it's a perfect opening tune for this album)

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.