Tag Archives: sonic youth

2013, albums, miscellaneous, music, personal, thoughts, writing

In Memoriam Sonic Youth: Part IV. “Sister”

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Sonic Youth - "Sister"
Sonic Youth – “Sister”

 

This one is epic. I mean, I love all the albums that came before Sister, but I feel like this is the beginning of something really great. I mean, I think you all know what is going to come after this album. Now, I know that “Evol” is really great too, and I do love “Bad Moon Rising,” and even more so “Confusion is Sex,” but “Sister” is one of the albums that has been getting constant plays on my stereo since I first heard it.

There are so many classic SY tracks on this one that’s it’s hard to know where I should begin, so I guess that I should just start at the beginning of the album and work through it from there. And this album has a great album opener with “Schizophrenia.” I specifically remember coming to “Sister” around the same time that I first picked up a guitar and started bashing away at it, trying to learn every song that I could, which usually just meant me playing every note every second and trying to listen for when they matched what was coming through the stereo and then trying to memorize what I was doing so that I could maybe, possibly, replicate that at a later point.

Well, when I tried to learn how to play “Schizophrenia” I found that my usual strategy really wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t figure out why none of open string major or minor chords that I knew weren’t fitting any of the sounds that were coming out of my stereo. I mean, I think I played every chord up there on that poster of 24 or so chords. I even tried the ones with the number 7 next to them, those are the weird jazz chords, right? At least that was what I was thinking at the time. Anyway, all that I remember from trying to figure out the song was that I thought it was in the key of B. Now that I’m much older I know that, yes, there is a B in that chord, but I would have to sit down to the piano to figure out what the other pitches are, because lo and behold, I was not aware, at the age of 12 or 13 or whatever, that one could tune the guitar to anything other than EADGBE.

Oh, Sonic Youth. You have taught me so many things. And maybe this is the point of discover, or attempted discovery that has set me on the path that I am still on today. I’m still the same person, trying to figure out what is going on in all of the things that he hears. I’m still forever sitting at a piano trying to pick apart tone clusters and writing them out.

But, “Schizophrenia” into “(I got a) Catholic Block”? Don’t even try to pretend that that isn’t one hell of a way to open an album. Things are pulled back a little for Kim’s entrance, with “Beauty Lies in the Eye,” a song that has always reminded me of Evol. It just captures a very similar atmosphere as Evol. There is something creepy about the cavernous sound of the percussion and the aimlessly strummed guitar in the background combined with Kim’s half spoken half breathily sung vocal.

Stereo Sanctity

Oh, but “Stereo Sanctity.” How that song will forever remain as my answer to “Oh, you’ve never heard Sonic Youth before?” It will always end up on any mixtape that I make for anyone that needs an introduction to the band. I can play this song on repeat for a day and not even get sick of it ever. The way that it opens with just a cloud of noise and then Lee coming in with his own wall of distortion a 1/2 step above Thurston and not resolving it, or even trying, and the way that you can hear Thurston laugh a little bit about it if you listen closely. The dynamic of the band is perfect throughout this song. I still can’t even describe what it is that is happening in the chorus of the song. The guitar sounds so wobbily, like it is going to fall apart at any moment. It’s as if the song is hanging on by a thread throughout, but somehow they manage to keep it together, at least until the exact midpoint of the song where everything starts to go haywire.

The classic tracks keep coming with “Tuff Gnarl.” One song after another is memorable, but “Tuff Gnarl” finally gives us a song that is immediately recognizable upon the first few notes. That one’s also got the noisy breakdown that sounds like the beginnings of what we’ll get to hear on “Eric’s Trip” or “Total Trash” coming up on “Daydream Nation.”

Tuff Gnarl

The constant back and forth between Thurston and Lee’s straight ahead tunes, where it sounds like they are literally fighting their guitars off their bodies, against Kim’s moodier, sometimes somber material that comes out of “Evol,” creates a good pacing throughout. But, I remember sort of skipping past those slower tunes when I was listening to the album for the first few years. I’d skip right to “Hot Wire My Hearth,” then fast-forward through “Cotton Crown” so that I could get straight to “White Cross” and “Master-Dik.”

If I was ever in doubt about how much I loved Sonic Youth when I was a kid, this was the album that solidified it. Song after song after song of just everything that Sonic Youth has to offer. As a kid I was completely unaware of the social context in which these songs were produced, or what time (I guess I had a little bit of a clue, but I don’t remember thinking of it too much) they were made. The point is, now that I think about it, this album is pretty close to timeless. There really isn’t anything about the sound of the album that screams 1987.

Next up, “Daydream Nation.” I’m going to have to prepare myself for this one. I have a feeling it will be quite long. Wouldn’t be surprised if I have to split that one into 2 posts.

Until then…

2013, albums, miscellaneous, music, personal, thoughts, writing

In Memoriam Sonic Youth: Part III. “Evol”

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Sonic Youth - "Evol"
Sonic Youth – “Evol”

Enter Steve Shelley. Classic lineup now in place. Sonic Youth shows, on “Evol,” that they are interested in writing more orthodox melodies, but they are still not interested in sounding any different. That scary quality that I mentioned with “Confusion is Sex” remains on this album, and I think that it is somewhat amplified on this album.

I hate talking about or even mentioning things about music that are so subjective (re: feelings, images, other personal things that can’t be backed up with facts) but I think that is the reason that I started writing about all the Sonic Youth albums in the first place. My experience with this album was on cassette, and I remember I was in 8th grade listening to this tape on my GPX tape deck with really terrible speakers. The player was sitting on my desk and I was ostensibly “doing homework” (I still remember: it was a project for Italian) but what I was really doing was staring at the tape as it went from one side of the cassette to the other. Over and over and over again.

Tom Violence

Opening with “Tom Violence” starts the album on a perfect note. Thurston is coming into his own as a song writer. In my mind this starts the chain of epic Sonic Youth classics that grows to include “Expressway to yr. Skull (or Madonna, Sean and Me, whatever you want to call it), “Schizophrenia,” “Teenage Riot,” “Silver Rocket,” “Dirty Boots,” and on and on. It’s not so much just T-money either, the rest of the band is starting to find their own voices as well. Lee settles into his role as the SY poet laureate with “In the Kingdom #19” with his spoken word over top of what sounds like SY’s first attempt at a film score. The instruments on that track are not just pushed back in the mix, but they seem to have a gate, or a compressor on them that prevents anything from really breaking through the surface. They are clearly background, diegesis to Lee’s non.

“Death to our Friends” brings slack stringed peculiarity back to the fore in a densely layered track that points to Daydream Nation in the way that the lines combine, and the way that the background noise takes shape. The band’s sonic palette is growing and this album finds them toying a lot more with ambience. If I’m not mistaken this was around the time that they scored the film “Made in U.S.A” a poorly received film that was produced in 1987, the year after “Evol” was released. DGC also re-released the soundtrack as a tape, which of course I heard. All that I remember about it, though, is that two of the song titles are “Mackin’ for Doober,” and “Tuck and Dar.” I don’t know why I remember some of the stuff that I do, but I just do.

Death To Our Friends

For all of the ways that “Bad Moon Rising” was creepy, or unnerving, “Evol” is and more. The structures are tighter. Nothing bleeds into anything, there is no attempt to make an entire album side sound like a suite, but that doesn’t mean that the songs don’t sound like they go together. There’s a little bit more light on this album, so to speak.

For all the difficulty that I had getting into “Bad Moon Rising” I think I had a bit more of a hard time getting into “Evol.” At that time I kept comparing it to “Sister,” which I had been listening to a lot more at the same time. I think that I was focusing a little too much on things like the ending of “Madonna, Sean and Me” when the song just descends into a cloud of reverberation and feedback. What happened to the awesome song? Why did it just disappear like that? Is the chorus going to come back? These were the things that I care about around the time when I first heard “Evol.”

Thankfully I’ve grown up and learned to appreciate this album for the important step in the evolution of Sonic Youth that it is. Only 3 years after “Confusion is Sex” and they are lightyears away from that debut. Next in the series is “Sister,” placing us deep into the territory of “classic” Sonic Youth.

2013, albums, music, reviews

Album Review: Ex-Easter Island Head – “Mallet Guitars Three”

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Ex-Easter Island Head - "Mallet Guitars Three"
Ex-Easter Island Head – “Mallet Guitars Three”

Going off of things that I have been thinking about a lot lately, which is to say things that I have been thinking about for a long time but only just started writing about: music should provide the listener with something to think about. Music should be different and it should take a contrastive perspective on things. It’s about development and moving forward, taking things that we thought were familiar and finding new ways to approach that familiar thing to make it less so.

The first time that I heard Ex-Easter Island Head my knee-jerk reaction was to compare the sounds to what Sonic Youth were doing thirty years ago. It came off as variations on a theme of “Lee Is Free,” but I was way off. There is a lot of experimenting with a new approach to the guitar, using it as essentially a strictly percussive instrument, but the focus, the more you listen to it, seems to become less about a non-idiomatic method of playing the guitar, and more about creating swelled drones and minimalist percussion patterns that just so happen to be a result of mallets against the body of a guitar.

This latest installment is the third multi-movement work from the Liverpool collective and a further exploration of their technique. The opening of the first movement allows for the resonant sound of the open tuned guitars to ring, pulsing in their tintinnabulations before harsher timbres are introduced. Multiple layers of smooth, high glissandi combine with lower grating of objects against the wound strings with some bells jangling as a further development of the opening sounds for added affect.

Most notably on this album is the extended use of silence, or at perhaps the extended use of ambiance would be a better way of putting it. Whereas on the earlier albums there seemed to be more of a concentration on the minimalist, cycling percussion patterns, this release is full of lush full sounds. The percussive hits, at least for the opening movement, are allowed to form, grow and decay with little intervention. The attacks are muted and sound more like the amplified ring of a bass drum surging underneath at intervals.

Without having anything to do with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Ex-Easter Island Head is able to capture elements of the less-controlled parts of Godspeed songs, at the end of the first movement, for example.

In the 2nd movement the minimalist percussive focus returns, though it does so with pauses, once again allowing the ambiance to breathe. Despite the sounds of mallets striking the guitars, they begin to sound as though they are completely separate entities where the ringing guitars – though you as the listener are aware that they are being struck – begin to sound as though they are a completely separately generated sound.

New sounds are added as the movements continue. Sounds coaxed from the guitars that resemble piano chords, high pings of tight struck strings, the ever present low rumble moaning below a slow countermelody against the highly active upper motion (another allusion to gamelan composition).

Overall the albums interesting and engaging mix of percussive effects and ambient sounds  creates an arc where the fourth movement resembles the tone of the first, focusing more on tone and ambiance than the sharp percussive attacks of the middle movements. The last few minutes achieving the full-bodied and consonant calm resembling the opening movement of Glenn Branca’s 5th Symphony, in it’s satisfying cohesion of tones. In those middle movements, though the ambient drones are featured, the more prominent characteristic becomes the development of rhythm. It’s growth and decay, moving away and returning. It’s not a new concept, but done well it is very effective.

Ex-Easter Island Head’s “Mallet Guitars Threes” is available now on vinyl and as a digital download here.

2013, albums, miscellaneous, personal, thoughts, writing

In Memoriam Sonic Youth: Part II. “Bad Moon Rising”

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Sonic Youth - "Bad Moon Rising"
Sonic Youth – “Bad Moon Rising”

I always thought that this album was a strange way, of sorts, to follow up something like “Confusion is Sex.” But I think where that album captured the live energy of the band, this one captures them in the studio conceiving of an actual “album” album.

The fact that all of the songs blend together the way that they do is no mistake, it was a way for the band to make smoother transitions between songs when they were performed live. This was all in a bid to do away with 5 minute tuning sessions in between songs, as they didn’t have an arsenal of guitars on hand at this point in their careers, so these transitions were created to allow Lee or Thurston a few seconds to tune for the next song. The result of this is an album that is linked, obviously, harmonically and melodically as well as in timbre and mood.

I know that it sounds cheesy or stupid or whatever to foist the extramusical jargon onto an album, but I’m going to do it anyway. This album has always felt like Autumn to me. Yes, of course the cover has a lot to do with it, but there is a coldness on this album that isn’t on their debut full-length. The songs are languid, they wander (not in a bad way, by any means), the band is not afraid to have some cleaner guitar sounds. You can definitely hear them moving towards the songs on “Evol” and “Sister” a lot, especially on a track like “I Love Her All The Time,” a song that starts off innocently enough with Thurston floating out the lyrics with some percussion and bass backdrop underneath minimal guitar sounds, strings bent and echoing off into the distance. It isn’t very long before they are off and running into a wall of noise and (I assume) drumstick-wedged-under-guitar-strings type maneuvers.

But the songs here are better shaped than the ones that appear on “Confusion is Sex.” Where they came up with one idea for each of those songs, this album finds them needing to come up with significantly more material and to find interesting ways to get into and out of those ideas. I think that this is maybe the most important album for Sonic Youth as a group of people developing a writing process. It finds a nice balance between free and fixed forms.

For me, I can’t remember when it was that I first heard this album, or where I was when I was listening to it. I think that that must mean that I came to it a bit later. I do remember, however, that upon hearing it I did not immediately get into it. I didn’t immediately “get” it. I was of the mind that “there’s nothing catchy on this one” (I’m hearing myself say that in a whiny voice. I’m sure that if I said that or though that that I would say or think it in a whiny voice). I wanted the action of “Inhuman” and the noise of “Confusion is Next.” Now that I’m (significantly) older I can truly appreciate how good this album actually is.

I think that one of the reasons that I found it difficult to get into this album initially is that I couldn’t figure out which songs were which. Because they all blended together I couldn’t figure out what part that I remembered came from what song. Obviously, that is all pretty meaningless to me now. Who cares where the songs begin and end? It’s best to listen to an album all the way through anyway.

The 2nd side of the album is broken up a little bit more and has some more experimental (that’s a relative term. So when saying that something that Sonic Youth is doing is “more experimental” is saying something). “Justice is Might” slowly comes together, pulling itself up and staggering into form, the lazy guitar and vocal pulled through time by Bob Bert’s solid, uptempo drumming. That one doesn’t hang around too long, and we still have some equally spacey tracks like “Echo Canyon” and “Satan is Boring.”

The star of the show, though, is “Death Valley ’69.” In my mind it’s their first “hit.” It’s really just a classic Sonic Youth song. Thurston and Lydia Lunch (who is from my hometown) lazily sing over top of each other while the band focuses their energy on maintaining a fantastic amount of tension for extended periods before all is lost in a scratchy howl from Lunch.

Fast-forwarding to now, 2013, I started thinking about what all of this meant from an analysis perspective, what with the linking of the songs and the guitar tunings as sort of symbolizing the modulations from track to track if we are to think of the first several songs as really parts of one larger song. I started doing some initial transcriptions of the opening, and taking a post-tonal approach to it just to see what is going on, if I can. What I am finding is that it isn’t as complex as it sounds, but it’s definitely weird. Weird is good. Weird gives me something to look into, a coil to unwind. The thing is is that I have so many things that I want to look at and that I have started or half-finished that I can’t take on any more extra projects. The sketches that I have down for this album though have all the notes that I need to pick up exactly where I left off whenever I am ready and able to pick it up again.

So, in short, this album went from being something that took me a long time to get into when I was (much) younger, to something that I still listen to today and realize that there is more to it than meets the ear. The next album, though, is when things really start to get good.

2013, miscellaneous, music, personal, thoughts

In Memoriam Sonic Youth: Part I. “Confusion is Sex/Kill Yr. Idols”

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Sonic Youth - "Confusion is Next + Kill Yr. Idols"
Sonic Youth – “Confusion is Next + Kill Yr. Idols”

Sonic Youth is undoubtedly the most important band to me personally for a number of reasons. First off they were the first band that I listened to that not many other people I knew were listening to, and more importantly after hearing them I realized that a rock band can do literally whatever they wanted. Why weren’t more artists being as unique as SY? That uniqueness and individuality translated to “this band doesn’t give a fuck!” in my mind and that was a good thing. A very good thing.

I decided that since this band has been such an important part of my life, and I can say in complete honesty that I would not be where I am today if it weren’t for this band, that I would write up a post for each of their albums. Though I’m not aiming to review them (that’s been done, obviously, as some of these albums are almost 30 years old), I would rather go through them chronologically recalling how they affected me when I first heard them, or what I think about when I return to them over and over again after all these years. The posts most likely will not appear day after day in sequence, but I’ll keep the series going until it’s done.

I was still pretty young when my brother got “Confusion is Sex/Kill yr. Idols” (too young to have any money of my own). DGC was in the process of re-releasing SY’s entire back catalog and I remember there was an ad in Spin that had a list of all the albums (up to “Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star”…which will give you some idea of the timeline here) and we were dutifully trying to get all of them.

One of the things that I remember about hearing this album for the first time was that I couldn’t stop listening to it. It was so curious to me. It “sounded like shit,” was my first thought as I was still deep in the throes of a Smashing Pumpkins “Siamese Dream” obsession, with it’s meticulously clean, “perfect” guitar tone and crystal clear production. Sonic Youth, in comparison, sounded dark, mysterious, evil, scary in some ways. Walking to school listening to this album (on a Memorex that I dubbed from the CD) on my Walkman as I walked to school I remember listening to “Shaking Hell,” and the power of Kim Gordon’s voice, with the sparse emptiness of the hollow accompaniment echoing in the distance, coming off as cold, perfectly matching the brisk Fall of Western New York.

“Freezer Burn/I Wanna Be Your Dog” was a favorite, and I sure as hell didn’t know that this was a cover song, let alone who Iggy Pop was. The sheer energy and noise of “Inhuman” was the first time that I heard a song that just used noise as an instrument. Thurston’s atonal yelps sounded at once wrong and perfect. This sounded like music that anyone could do, but at the same time I knew that only Sonic Youth could. This sounded like music that I wanted to make, or at least it was music that wanted me want to make music, but I didn’t know where 90% of the sounds were coming from.

Confusion Is Next

Slack stringed weirdness at the beginning of the title track serves as uneven punctuation as the near-steady (-ish) accelerando throughout the song gets a start before another loud and squealing guitar comes crashing into the track. An entire song, on an actual album, that I was hearing for the first time, that used just cluster chords and gesture as the entire harmonic structure (though I definitely didn’t think of music in these terms when I was 13). Why do you need chords anyway? The song is tense and then to increase the tension they speed it up to a frantic pace after a section in the middle that breaks the song up a little bit. It all makes sense to me now, but then I was just in awe. I guess I still am but in a bit of a different way.

“Brother James,” listening to it now shows more the direction that the band would head in as they moved toward “Bad Moon Rising,” with verse/chorus/verse structure and guitar lines that, though off-kilter and de-tuned, are actual riffs.

Brother James

Listening back to this now I am left thinking something that has been on my mind for a long time. It’s not the elements of a song – the melodies, harmonies, structure, lyrical content etc. – that a person connects with instantly, it’s the timbre. That’s the most exciting part of listening to music, in my opinion. Think of it this way: how often in life do you get to experience something that you have never experienced before, or didn’t think was possible? How often do you get to see something that you have never seen before? Find out that something you couldn’t even conceive of actually exists? How often do you get to hear something that truly doesn’t sound – actually sound – like anything you have ever heard before?

To me, it seems that that is going to be the dividing line for people. The first thing one is confronted with when listening to music is the sound. For some it’s an impenetrable barrier, while for others it is a welcomed change from everything else that we’ve ever experienced. That element of otherness is something that continues throughout most of Sonic Youth’s discography, and I still remember my 12 or 13 year old self getting excited about music stripped to its most basic elements, and how powerful that could be.

2013, albums, music, news

New Track: Lee Ranaldo & The Dust – “Lecce Leaving”

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Lee Ranaldo & The Dust
Lee Ranaldo & The Dust photo by John Von Pamer

It’s still so strange to me to have to write, or even think, the phrase “formerly of Sonic Youth” or “ex-Sonig Youth,” but I think that we are all just going to have to somehow learn to get through it. We can do this. Together.

I’m not sure what makes it more disapointing: that we will not (most likely, but hopefully maybe there is still a possibility of a shred of hope that maybe we will?) hear another note by Sonic Youth, or that the ex-members have really not been making the kinds of albums that I can really get behind.

Ranaldo’s last album (what everyone seemed to refer to as his “first solo album” or, when people that should know better finally realized that it wasn’t his first solo album, his “first song-based solo album” as if what he had done before couldn’t be called songs for some reason?) “Between the Times & The Tides” was something that I could just never get into. I tried, oh how I tried. It just sort of fell flat. I know that that is unfortunate and unfair, in that on its own its actually a decent album. But, there is no way that I (or probably anyone) can listen to it (or anything that he does) without inadvertently (or maybe overtly) comparing it to Sonic Youth’s material.

On October 8 Matador will release Ranaldo’s latest, “Last Night on Earth,” with band The Dust that includes drummer Steve Shelley (Lee Ranaldo: now with 25% Sonic Youth!), Alan Licht and Tim Lüntzel. Listen to the track “Lecce Leaving” below. It immediately sounds richer and fuller than most of the material on “Times and Tides.” The band works well together to create a dynamic sound that is considerably more dense and contrapuntal. Shelley’s drumming adds the perfect touch, as does the slide guitar, steel string acoustic and keys. It’s a 7 minute tune that I almost wish would go on for 20. Though the lyrical content is admittedly darker, I can’t help but think that the arrangement is joyful in parts, or excitable at the very least, until the coda where things resolve in an unsettling, dark manner.

The album is available for pre-order on CD or LP from the Matador store, and as a download from iTunes. And check out Lee’s site here.

Tour dates for Lee Ranaldo & The Dust:

North America :

Tue-Oct-08 Hudson, NY Club Helsinki
Wed-Oct-09 Buffalo, NY Tralf Music Hall
Fri-Oct-11 Toronto, ONT Horseshoe Tavern
Sat-Oct-12 Detroit, MI Trinosophes
Sun-Oct-13 Chicago, IL Empty Bottle
Mon-Oct-14 Madison, WI High Noon Saloon
Tue-Oct-15 Minneapolis, MN The Triple Rock
Thu-Oct-17 Iowa City, IA Gabe’s
Fri-Oct-18 Omaha, NE The Waiting Room
Sat-Oct-19 Lawrence, KS The Bottleneck
Sun-Oct-20 St. Louis, MO The Firebird
Tue-Oct-22 Nashville, TN Exit/In
Wed-Oct-23 Asheville, NC The Grey Eagle
Fri-Oct-25 Brooklyn, NY The Bell House

Europe :

sun 10-Nov-2013 NL GRONINGEN – VERA
Mon 11-Nov-2013 DE HAMBURG – KAMPNAGEL
Wed 13-Nov-2013 DE COLOGNE – GEBAUDE 9
Thu 14-Nov-2013 FR METZ – acoustic show at le musée de la cour d’or
Fri 15-Nov-2013 FR METZ – CAVEAU DES TRINITAIRES – MUSIQUE VOLANTE FESTIVAL
sun 17-Nov-2013 CH LAUSANNE – LE ROMANDIE
Mon 18-Nov-2013 FR FEYZIN – Epicerie Moderne
Wed 20-Nov-2013 FR VILLENEUVE D’ASQ – FESTIVAL TOUR DE CHAUFFE AT LA FERME D’EN HAUT
Thu 21-Nov-2013 UK LONDON – THE GARAGE
Fri 22-Nov-2013 UK CAMBER SANDS – ATP FESTIVAL at Camber Sands
Sat 23-Nov-2013 FR PARIS – Boulogne Billancourt BB MIX FESTIVAL
Mon 25-Nov-2013 FR POITIERS – CONFORT MODERNE
Tue 26-Nov-2013 FR TOURS – TEMPS MACHINE

North America again:

Fri-Dec-06 Portland, OR Doug Fir Lounge
Sat-Dec-07 Vancouver, BC Biltmore Cabaret
Sun-Dec-08 Seattle, WA Barboza
Wed-Dec-11 San Francisco, CA The Chapel
Fri-Dec-13 Los Angeles, CA The Echo

2012, miscellaneous, music, news, songs, tympanogram

New track: Chelsea Light Moving – "Burroughs"

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(Originally posted to Tympanogram on June 26, 2012)

Chelsea Light Moving
Chelsea Light Moving

As a Sonic Youth obsessive, I take it as my duty to inform everyone that Thurston Moore has formed another new project. The name of this new venture is Chelsea Light Moving and they popped up out of nowhere late last week on the Matador Matablog.

Thankfully the band sounds like they are interested in more of the late Sonic Youth aesthetic than they are in the solo Thurston Moore sound. The track, “Burroughs,” comes off sounding like a B-side for The Eternal or Rather Ripped, with an upbeat and noisy verse, sharp guitar stabs, and an extended exploratory coda. This track captures the energy that I believe is missing from Thurston’s Demolished Thoughts effort. It sounds raw, exciting, and it doesn’t even matter to me that this is probably the millionth track attributed to the influence of William S. Burroughs that Moore has penned.

The band is rounded out by Keith Wood on guitar, Samara Lubelski on bass, and drummer John Maloney. According to the Matador press release the track was recorded and mixed May 18-20, 2012, by Justin Pizzoferrato at Sonelab, Easthampton, MA. And there are some (very few) dates posted for Thurston, with no mention if it is him appearing with solo material or with new Chelsea Light Moving tracks. We are promised another track in a week though, so be sure to check back and grab that one as well.

[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/chelsea_light_moving_burroughs.mp3|titles=Chelsea Light Moving – Burroughs] Chelsea Light Moving  | Blog
Upcoming Thurston Moore US dates:
June 24 – Missoula, MT  The Top Hat
June 27 – Bouler, CO  Boulder Theater
June 29 – Denver, CO  Larimer Lounge
2012, EP, music, news, songs, tympanogram

New track: Cuff the Duke – "The Diamond Sea" (Sonic Youth cover)

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Originally posted to Tympanogram on March 14, 2012)

Cuff the Duke - "In Our Time"
Cuff the Duke - "In Our Time"

I’m beside myself with joy right now. Sheer joy. Cuff the Duke is an amazing band from Toronto, and as is the case with too many great Canadian bands, they are quite often overlooked by American blogs. Cuff the Duke has released 5 albums since 2002, each increasingly better than the last. The most recent, Morning Comes, is the first part of a 2 part album, and was released in October of 2011. Produced by Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor, the album delivers all of their tuneful songwriting that finds the perfect balance of rock crunch and country twang, not to mention the soulful singing of Wayne Petti.

I would highly recommend checking out all of their albums, especially the newest one and their 2010 album Way Down Here (my pick that year for best album).

Their cover of Sonic Youth’s “Diamond Sea” has recently surfaced on Soundcloud, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that the results are simple stunning. The band manages to capture the affecting atmosphere of the famous Washing Machine closing track while sanding down the edges and making it all their own. They don’t change anything drastically, instead great care is taken to delicately insert their own unique sound while still managing to sound surprisingly like the original. You can listen to the track and download it below.

Connect with Cuff the Duke // web | Facebook | Myspace | Twitter
[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Cuff-the-Duke-Diamond-Sea.mp3|titles=The Diamond Sea]
2012, albums, music, news, songs, tympanogram, video

New track: Lee Ranaldo – "Off the Wall"

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(Originally posted on Tympanogram.com on March 5, 2012)
Lee Ranaldo
Lee Ranaldo
Watching your favorite band break up is tough to do. It’s like being a kid and having to decide if you are going to live with your mom or your dad after your parents get divorced. I’m still in the phase where I’m holding out hope that Sonic Youth isn’t going to disband, but rumors of this coming Summer’s Lollapalooza performance being the bands last are going around, and sooner or later we are all going to have to face the inevitable together.

In the meantime, Thurston Moore has released an album of genteel, somnolence-inspiring arrangements that function essentially as ruminations on open guitar tunings; Steve Shelley is drumming with Disappears (a band that nobody would be paying attention to if Steve Shelley wasn’t drumming for them); and Lee Ranaldo is making his debut as a solo songwriter with his album “Between the Tides and the Times” on Matador Records.

This isn’t his debut album by any means, as he has released a handful of highly experimental albums including East Jesus, From Here to Infinity, and Amarillo Ramp (for Robert Smithson) that would test the fidelity of any true Sonic Youth fan. These albums are in addition to other free jazz albums that he has collaborated on.

So far we only have one song from the new album, set for release on March 20. “Off the Wall” is structured in typical verse/chorus/verse fashion with a free-wheeling easiness in the melody that sounds like it would fit perfectly on Rather Ripped. This is, oddly, quite a departure considering Ranaldo’s other works. Leave it to someone so completely left-of-center as Lee Ranaldo to release a straight ahead rock track and have it seem like a departure. The truth is that this track does sound like one of the songs that would appear on a Sonic Youth album, where Ranaldo is typically woefully underrepresented.

He’s also got some solo performances coming up, including a spot at Primavera. Check him out live if you can, as his band includes not only Steve Shelley (you know, the guy from Disappears), Nels Cline, Alan Licht and John Medeski. His tour, with M. Ward and Disappears, mostly hits up the East Coast and parts of the South and Midwest. You can check the dates here, and pre-order Between The Times and The Tides at Matador.

Lee Ranaldo on: Facebook | web | Twitter

[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Lee-Ranaldo-Off-The-Wall.mp3|titles=Off the Wall]

ETA (March 13, 2012): Lee’s album, “Between the Times and the Tides” is now streaming in its entirety on Rolling Stone.com.

Lee Ranaldo OFF THE WALL Official Video from Lee Ranaldo on Vimeo.

 

2011, albums, groovemine, music, reviews

Album review: Yuck – "Yuck"

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Finally, after all the hype of indie culture coming to the mainstream, with Arcade Fire winning the Album of the Year Grammy and every band everywhere looking for a unique sound, we get an album that gives us exactly what we need. Yuck has delivered an album that has garnered a lot of attention for its fresh sound that, ironically, is captured by going back to sounding like the music of the 1990’s.

It is funny to think that we can actually refer to this music accurately by saying that it sounds reminiscent to the songs of late last century. A time when MTV actually played music. When shows like “120 Minutes” would showcase music that was up and coming, college radio fare that was not getting much, if any, mainstream attention. I’m sure I am not the only one that remembers staying up late as a kid to catch a glimpse of all the cool, obscure music that was coming out so that I could slyly reference it later in school when talking to my friends. Man, they would think I was so cool. Not that Yuck’s music embraces obscure acts of a bygone era. On the contrary, it captures the essence of the indie rock scene of the 90s that we all know and love but may have passed by those who were not paying attention. This music is a celebration of a time gone by, though its return is more than welcome.

I read a description online of Yuck as a “rock revival” act. Though I know the point that this particular review was getting at I still find it frustrating that the very people that listen to and love rock music are constantly claiming that it is a dead artform. Take for example every time that The Strokes, or any member of The Strokes, releases an album. The magazine covers seem to always ask, “Can The Strokes save rock?” as if it is a genre that is gone, or at least deteriorated and in need of rescuing. I don’t know if Yuck has the power, or even the willingness to “rescue” rock music but they have crafted a beautiful album that is large in scope and certainly charming in its reminiscence of music that music fans of my generation grew up listening to.
Yuck
Yuck - "Yuck"
Strands of early Sloan, early Smashing Pumpkins, Thrush Hermit, Hum, Sebadoh, The Burdocks and Dinosaur Jr. (in the album’s noisier moments) shine through track after track. The album doesn’t come off sounding like some unearthed relic, nor does it feel or sound old or stale in the slightest. Ideas and sound taken from the 90s are developed a bit with tighter rhythm section behind the initial wall of shoegazey noise.

I’m sure that there will be plenty of people tossing around the term “post-modern” in reference to Yuck. Sure, if the shoe fits, but those that dismiss this album as a simple throwback are missing the point. This album and this band seem to be reminding a tired, fractured and disenfranchised indie-rock fan base, that is constantly pulled from one direction to the next, of where we have come from. Perhaps this album can serve as a reset point where we can ponder the roots of all that is coming out today. Or, perhaps this album can serve as a direct line connecteing the music of today to the music of twenty years ago as an alternate reality where an overabundance of easily reproducable, easily attainable music never came to be and therefore never forced fans to choose one of a mulitude of made up genres to which they pledge their unflagging allegiance. Imagine good music stripped of hipster culture. This, I believe, is the world in which Yuck longs to exist.

The album is an “album”. By that I mean that it is a complete journey from beginning to end. Noisy rockers such as album opener “Get Away”, “The Wall” and “Holing Out” are broken up by quieter, more contemplative material such as “Stutter”, “Suicide Policeman” and “Rose Gives a Lilly”. All the songs feature prominently catchy hooks and layered guitar work. “Shook Down”, with its duetting boy/girl vocal, is especially effective as is the up-tempo distored folkiness of “Georgia”.

It seemed to come at us out of nowhere but now we are 20 years past the Seattle “grunge” explosion and just as far are we from the surge of great music that came out of the Halifax scene around the same time. It seems that this is just about the perfect time for a band like Yuck to bring us right back to the comfort of our indie-rock roots.

Soundgarden has reformed, Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr. have been playing shows, and Beavis and Butthead is returning to television. It seems that a full on 90s reboot is taking shape. It’s a good thing that a band like Yuck can make something new amidst all this looking back.
[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/01-Get-Away.mp3|titles=Get Away]
[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/08-Stutter.mp3|titles=Stutter]
[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/04-Holing-Out.mp3|titles=Holing Out]