Sonic Youth's First Decade

Thoughts on six albums, three EPs, two live slabs, and four drummers

Sonic Youth circa 1986, maybe? L-R: Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Kim Gordon, Steve Shelley

I can — and do — go years without listening to Sonic Youth. But when I was in high school at the end of the ’80s, they were one of a group of bands, also including Pussy Galore, the Butthole Surfers, and Einstürzende Neubauten, that blew my head open. And recently I’ve found myself returning to their work: revisiting their early ’90s album Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star, reading (well, skimming) Thurston Moore’s and Kim Gordon’s memoirs, and hearing for the first time the amazing 1986 “bootleg” live album Walls Have Ears, which the band reissued in January. So this week’s newsletter is gonna be a deep(ish) dive into their first — and best; it’s OK to admit it — decade of work. Rather than follow strict chronology, though, I’m going to deal with these records more or less in the order I heard them.

I don’t remember how I heard of Sonic Youth, but I bought two of their albums, both on cassette, at more or less the same time: 1987’s Sister and 1983’s Confusion Is Sex. Shortly after that, I got the live cassette Sonic Death: Early Sonic 1981-1983 in trade. I gave a friend my copy of the Cro-Mags’ Age of Quarrel for it. We both thought we got the better end of that deal.

Knowing almost nothing about how electric guitars “worked,” but knowing how they’d always sounded on the punk, hard rock, and metal albums I’d been blasting since about the age of 11 (everything from Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ted Nugent, and Motörhead to Iggy Pop, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and Flipper), I was totally fascinated, from the first notes of Sister’s opening track, “Schizophrenia,” by the way Sonic Youth’s guitars seemed to slip-slide-clang out of tune, then somehow recover and stumble onwards. The same thing was true of the vocals. I had a few mental models for how pop music voices were “supposed” to sound, and Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon — and to a lesser degree Lee Ranaldo — didn’t fit any of them. Sometimes they sounded like they were just reciting the lyrics, a gambit I was familiar with from the work of Lou Reed, but other times Moore in particular seemed like he was trying to sing, but couldn’t hold a note for long, so it would slip away from him.

Sister is a record full of catchy rock songs that just feel slightly off, because of the weird guitar tunings and the reverb on Steve Shelley’s drums. In some ways I feel it’s the ideal entry point to their catalog, though everything else will probably be a little disappointing after you hear its immaculate first side: “Schizophrenia,” “Catholic Block,” “Beauty Lies in the Eye,” “Stereo Sanctity,” and “Pipeline/Kill Time”). Even the second side can’t really stand up to that, though “Pacific Coast Highway,” “White Cross,” and their cover of Crime’s “Hot Wire My Heart” are all great.

Confusion Is Sex, on the other hand, is a dark and frightening album. Some songs, like “The World Looks Red” and “Making the Nature Scene,” have pulsing postpunk grooves which I would learn much later were stylistic holdovers from their self-titled 1981 EP, but their live cover of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” with Kim Gordon on vocals, is a howling ball of noise recorded with seemingly deliberate crudity. Those all come fairly deep into the record, though; it starts out with “(She’s in a) Bad Mood” and “Protect Me You,” two tracks in a row that clang and throb at a crawling, ritualistic tempo. (The album featured Jim Sclavunos on drums on most tracks, though Bob Bert played on two. Sclavunos was a short-timer, while Bert would stay with the band until 1986, when he’d join Pussy Galore.) I didn’t know the term No Wave then, nor had I heard bands like Swans or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, so I had no reference point for this music, and I found it very unsettling. Confusion Is Sex wasn’t a record I listened to a lot; it wasn’t fun.

In 1988, Sonic Death was one of the noisiest and most abstract tapes in my collection. Long out of print but uploaded to YouTube by fans, it registers in 2024 as a string of deliberately nerve-jangling instrumentals, spliced together with equally deliberate crudity. The rhythm picks up occasionally, but in these early days, the band seemed mostly focused on letting detuned strings sag and cymbals hiss and slosh.

The first Sonic Youth record I bought on CD — and the first one I bought more or less upon release — was Daydream Nation, which was released by Blast First in the UK and Enigma in the US in October 1988. It struck me immediately as bigger than Sister, and not just because it was a 70-minute CD with 12 songs, many of them more than seven minutes long each. The band was stretching out, letting tracks end with long passages of intertwining guitar. It also sounded fuller, more like a conventional rock record. The first two songs, “Teen Age Riot” and “Silver Rocket,” lauched out of the speakers at your face, and “’Cross the Breeze” had some charging, grinding riffs almost worthy of Metallica. “Candle” and “Total Trash” were thundering rock anthems, and the 14-minute “The Wonder/Hyperstation/Eliminator Jr.” trilogy that closed out the disc was a cathartic sustained explosion. The importance of former hardcore punk drummer Shelley to the band’s best albums really can’t be overstated, and the way he drives the Daydream Nation material is amazing. He was one of the best drummers in ’80s underground rock, period.

I only ever saw Sonic Youth live once, opening for Neil Young and Crazy Horse in 1991. I didn’t think they came off very well in a giant arena (and I didn’t love Goo, the album they were supporting). But I picked up a couple more of their records in the years that followed, finally hearing 1985’s Bad Moon Rising and 1986’s EVOL. If I had to rank their mid ’80s output, I’d say Sister > Bad Moon Rising > EVOL.

Bad Moon Rising, as befitting its title (a tribute to Creedence Clearwater Revival) and its unnerving cover art — a photograph of a scarecrow with a flaming jack o’ lantern for a head, set against the New York skyline from across the East River — is a dark, creepy album. Sonic Youth’s lyrics are rarely explicit or didactic, but when you get one song after another bearing almost Swans-esque titles like “Society is a Hole,” “I’m Insane,” and “Justice is Might,” it has a cumulative impact, especially since the tracks all bleed together, segued by looping noise interludes, one of which cuts up the Stooges’ “Not Right.” But the album also contains one of their most beautiful songs, the minimal but overpowering, side-ending “I Love Her All the Time.” Bob Bert’s drumming is minimal and junkyard tribal, prefiguring the Einstürzende Neubauten-gone-rockabilly approach he’d take in Pussy Galore, where his kit had an automobile gas tank instead of a snare.

“We weren’t remotely a goth band, but EVOL was our faux-goth record,” Gordon writes in Girl in a Band. In his memoir Sonic Life, Moore says “The songs…were a bit tamer than our previous recordings” and even compares them to the Replacements(!). It’s full of pieces like the drifting “Shadow of a Doubt,” on which she croon/murmurs phrases that suggest romance and the death drive at once, and “In the Kingdom #19,” which lets Lee Ranaldo get beatnik over abstract free rock; moments of genuine power are few and far between. The opening track, “Tom Violence,” has a great clanging/soaring guitar section that Caspar Brötzmann Massaker would rip off over and over, and “Expressway to Yr. Skull” (sometimes retitled “Madonna, Sean and Me”) rises and falls over the course of more than seven minutes, offering early catharsis and a slow comedown and serving as a perfect album closer. (The cassette and CD also include a cover of the Kim Fowley song “Bubblegum” as a bonus track, but its ’70s hard rock vibe spoils the mood — skip it.)

There are several other releases worth at least one listen if you’re a diehard fan, like 1981’s self-titled debut EP, 1989’s The Whitey Album (released as Ciccone Youth), 1983’s Kill Yr Idols EP, and 1985’s Master-Dik single. Of these, the self-titled EP is the most interesting. It’s their only release (besides Sonic Death) with Richard Edson on drums; he quit to become an actor. And while he gives an incredible comic performance in Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 movie Stranger Than Paradise, it’s fascinating to wonder what Sonic Youth might have evolved into if he’d stuck around, because he was also a member of the avant-dance group Konk, and he gives their music a bouncing postpunk energy. They could have been a Downtown dance band!

In recent years, Sonic Youth (mostly Steve Shelley, I think, but with input from other former members) have been putting their early catalog up on Bandcamp, and augmenting the canonical releases with a slew of live recordings, rarities compilations, and whatnot. In January, they reissued Walls Have Ears, a live “official bootleg” capturing portions of three 1985 UK gigs that was originally released by the Blast First label, then quickly withdrawn.

It’s an extraordinarily forceful document. Those who think of Kim Gordon as a deadpan post-Nico reciter of inscrutable poetry will be shocked by her wrathful delivery on “Brother James,” as the band pounds a clanging, deconstructivist riff into the floor. And the nearly 10-minute version of “Expressway to Yr. Skull” that comes a few songs later is absolutely monumental, wavering and rumbling with her bass huge in the mix as the guitars slowly fall to earth around her. The somewhat crude recording and raw performances — Moore and Ranaldo can be heard complaining about feedback in the microphones, and the lack of guitar in the monitors, between tracks — make the whole thing even more compelling. Based on this evidence, Sonic Youth was an incredible live force in the mid ’80s, and I wish I was just a few years older, so I could have seen them.

Their Bandcamp page offers more than a dozen other live recordings from between 1983 and 1989, many of them previously unreleased. There are a bunch more from the ’90s and 2000s, too, but to me Sonic Youth are an ’80s band; their later material just doesn’t have the juice that the work they did in their first decade has in abundance.

That’s it for now. See you next week, when I’ll have a very exciting announcement about a future release on Burning Ambulance Music!