Sonic Youth could've ended in 1987 and still had a glowing reputation. 1988's Daydream Nation is their peak, a titanic classic of alternative rock, but Sister is nearly as beloved. Some publications like Alternative Press have even made the case that it's a superior album (depends on whether you prefer conciseness or sprawl in your masterpieces). Sister captures the band channeling their innovative noise experiments through accessible songcraft. After four albums driven by the wild outer limits of what was possible with electric guitars, Sonic Youth decided to swaddle their vision in a warm blanket.
But it took them a while to get there. The band came out of New York's no-wave scene, which channeled rock-and-roll through the experimental musicianship and prepared instrumentation of modern classical music. This resulted in minor classics Confusion is Sex and Bad Moon Rising, dark albums full of violent imagery matched only by the band's violence towards their instruments. Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo made their guitars echo and wail, taking screwdrivers to the strings and amps, devising the strangest alternative tunings they could think of, and exploiting the warped construction of their cheap Japanese Fender knockoffs in order to create a frightening, unholy din of noise. With “Death Valley '69,” they even had a college-rock hit without watering down their sound. They were already on the come-up when they released EVOL in 1986.
The difference between Sonic Youth's first few albums and EVOL was massive in terms of clarity, focus, and songwriting. Before, they rambled; here, they struck. The culprit was obvious: new drummer Steve Shelley, who had cut his teeth in legendary hardcore punk band the Crucifucks, pushed the rest of the members into leaner compositions. Previous drummers Bob Bert and Jim Sclavunos had pounded with a caveman intensity behind the kit, but Steve Shelley was a technical and precise player who pushed songs forward with a real urgency. It forced the band to reckon with their beloved noise jams, which before had taken up the bulk of their songs. Starting with EVOL, Sonic Youth began using these outer-space explorations as pivot points and climaxes within more focused compositions.
Shelley arrived at the end of a long line of drummers, and he was the one who finally stuck – these four players had an incredible amount of chemistry, and they coasted into the studio, recorded Sister with a minimum of drama or fuss, and went straight back out to tour.
What they left behind was a mini-masterpiece, the first instance of what we'll be examining: the album that comes right before the magnum opus. It's Shelley who opens Sister, with a simple, tom-heavy drumbeat introducing “Schizophrenia,” one of the band's all-time classic songs. It encapsulates the entirety of the Sonic Youth Sound: arch, droning guitar riffs drive the song while Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon both contribute verses that show both of their lyrical styles. Moore's half exudes ineffable cool with straightforward narrative lyrics while Gordon goes for the visionary and abstract, drawling out evocative half-phrases. Joining them in the middle and ending the song are some of the band's intricate, intertwined guitar jamming (why else would you listen to Sonic Youth?) but they never explode or get lost in it; instead Shelley keeps it moving. His rhythm is low-key, meditative and hypnotic. And when the song finally unravels, it feels like the end of a journey – one with peaks and troughs, highs and lows. Forget songs; “Schizophrenia” is practically a suite.
Lest you doubt the band's newfound commitment to structure, “(I Got A) Catholic Block” rips through the haze with the most searing rawk riff in the band's catalogue to that point. The moment when the song unravels into pure feedback squelch, only to lock straight back into the riff like nothing had happened is a thrilling moment of whiplash, and it demonstrates how capably the band has learned to weaponize its experimental tendencies.
That's how it goes throughout Sister: moments where the songs seem to lose themselves are actually just the band leading you to a higher summit, a deeper valley, a new understanding. These songs have direction and purpose. The scuzz and darkness of EVOL suited the band well, but Sister is where they found their truest voice and sound.
The Peak:
Very little has to be said about Daydream Nation, one of the most (if not the single most) acclaimed albums of the 1980s. It contains “Teen Age Riot,” forever their defining anthem and the song that made me love music in the first place. It's one of the five best albums I've ever heard. The band take the sense of songcraft that they learned on Sister but allow it to blow up and balloon. All of the songs, from the three-and-a-half-minute “Silver Rocket” to the seven-minute “Total Trash,” are legitimately epics. God, I love it so much.
But the band wasn't happy with their label, Enigma Records, which didn't promote the album enough and, when it actually blew up, hadn't pressed enough copies to meet demand. The band's concern about payments led to them signing with Geffen, making them if not quite the first then one of the most acclaimed indie bands to make the major label jump.
The Comedown:
Not many people like Goo better than Sister or even the albums that preceded Sister, but it is undeniably a more important album. Sonic Youth were one of the earliest alternative rock bands to sign to a major label, and their example set a precedent for how that move, which grew more and more common as the 90s progressed, could be handled artistically. Goo is also bound up in a cultural moment: the rise of alternative rock and grunge into the mainstream. The European tour in support of the album, where the band played with Nirvana, was the focus of the seminal documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke, and of course anything that touched Nirvana around 1991-92 gets swallowed up in their mythic rise.
And yet it's totally possible to listen to Goo outside of that hallowed context: it wasn't until 1994's Dirty that Sonic Youth would truly react to being in the spotlight. But they're already using their major-label cash, and you can hear it: Goo is grungier and more polished than anything the band had done before. The opening track, “Dirty Boots,” has a classic quiet-LOUD explosion that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would use a year later and make famous. The production (initially by Nick Sansano and, after his departure, Ron Saint Germain) is cleaner and hits harder. But take one look at the classic hand-drawn album cover by Raymond Pettibon – stylish and memorable but opaquely cool and removed – and it becomes clear that Sonic Youth is in this game on their own terms. Even after defecting to a major label, they still thought of themselves as a small-time indie band.
You can see that on the odds and ends that the band leaves on the album – the tape bleed from a take of “Kool Thing” is left on at the end of “Mary-Christ,” and the band even attaches an entire song to the album (“Scooter + Jinx”) that originated as a noisy, tuneless epilogue to “Mildred Pierce.” Goo is a defiantly indie album released with a professional sheen, the band not afraid to be silly and weird just because they have big money behind them. If the songs themselves are more accessible, it's only because that slide towards accessibility and songcraft was a move that the band had been making for a while (take a look back at that Sister review).
That splaying, all-over-the-place energy, combined with the sharper sound, makes Goo a more navigable listen than any of their previous albums, which were always brilliant but often blended together when you weren't paying attention. The first four songs form a high-quality suite – Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon trade off, Thurston flexing his rock muscles with “Dirty Boots” and “Mary-Christ” while Kim goes for the lyrical feminist anthems with “Tunic (Song for Karen)” and the album's biggest hit, “Kool Thing.” After that, “Mote,” the album's mighty centerpiece and only Lee Ranaldo contribution, comes along to wipe the slate clean with its expansive seven-minute roar, and “My Friend Goo” serves as a silly palate cleanser. The second half of the album chugs along at a nice pace, three five-minute rockers interspersed with the “Mildred Pierce” / “Scooter + Jinx” duo.
The choice of where to go after a double album is always a vexed one: after blowing yourself out and throwing everything at the wall, what do you pick and choose to go into your next project? Sonic Youth chose to take the greater musical variety and range of moods that Daydream Nation showed, compress it down, expand lyrically, and give it a nice polish to boot. That they did it all without losing any of their footing in the counterculture or commitment to weirdness is a huge accomplishment. Goo may not be their strongest album – song-for-song it's weaker than Sister – but it still lives up to its outsized place in punk history.
The Verdict:
Here's the section where we have to confront a little thing called My Own Personal Bias: given the choice between a super-consistent album with a higher average quality and one with a more navigable arc but less consistency, I'll tend to go with the latter. Pick any given song off Sister and it'll be a brilliant encapsulation of all that makes Sonic Youth exalted and holy, whereas you might get something off Goo that's… not so distinguishable from many other Sonic Youth rockers. It's only the high baseline of quality that “Sonic Youth rocker” entails that saves it. But despite its monochrome cover, Goo sounds more vivid and has more variety. In this case, I'm going with the comedown album.
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