Burning Groove

Everyone loves a cover version, don't they? In 1987 Mike Watt, suffering from depression in the aftermath of fellow Minuteman D. Boon's death, pitched up in New York and stayed with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore for a while, playing bass on some of the sessions that would become the EVOL album. In an effort to get Watt active and enthusiastic about music again they hatched a plan that become Sonic Youth offshoot Ciccone Youth. Watt covered Madonna's Burning Up (as Burnin' Up) playing all the instruments (except for a Gregg Ginn guitar solo). Watt's cover is rough and ready, fuzzy and lo fi, a thing of beauty in many ways. 

Madonna's original dates from 1983, early 80s New York dance pop that has buckets of charm and some key Madonna tropes already well in place.

Burning Up

The sessions Watt played with Sonic Youth resulted in this cover of Madonna's 1985 smash Into The Groove.

Into The Groove(Y)

Like Watt's cover it's lo fi and sounds made for ghetto blasters and C90 cassettes, with grungy bass, a hissing drum machine and handclaps and Thurston's ultra- drawled vocal. When playing in the studio Sonic Youth would play the original version through one of the channels and fade it into and out of their own version. Yes, I'd love to hear a recording of that too. In the meantime here's Madonna's Desperately Seeking Susan associated single. if you get both playing at the same time on your computer you might be able to recreate Sonic Youth's experiment. 

Into The Groove

When Ciccone Youth's album The Whitey Album came out in 1988, a few months after their landmark Daydream Nation, many people assumed they were taking the piss or covering Madonna ironically. Thurston says this was most definitely not the case, that they loved the song, danced to it in NY clubs and were paying tribute to the woman who'd played in two No Wave bands, including one (spinal Root Gang) that eventually transformed into Swans. Sonic Youth loved that someone from their downtown scene had broken out and become huge. 

The Whitey Album probably overdoes it, fifty minutes when it could have been a really good twenty minute EP but Sonic/ Ciccone Youth were into sprawling records in 1988. The album includes the track Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu, a track with J Mascis on guitar and the first time I was aware of Neu's existence and Ciccone's cover of Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love, a cover with a vocal recorded by Kim in a karaoke booth and the video filmed with her lip syncing, looking cool as fuck in cut off jeans, while footage of the Vietnam War is projected behind her. 

Bizarrely, Robert Palmer had already crossed over into the US 80s indie- punk scene with his cover version of Husker Du's New Day Rising, played live at San Diego University Amphitheatre in 1987.  

Double Dub

Accidental/ ambient art- this is the detail of a large piece of plywood boarding up the windows of an empty shop in Chorlton with a small piece of black tape stuck in the centre. If I set out to paint something like this deliberately, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as this. 

Richard Norris has taken a detour recently. Alongside his always excellent monthly twenty minute ambient/ deep listening excursion Music For Healing (the most recent release in that series is the autumnal Equinox 9) Richard is now making dub and has a new label to put it out under- Oracle Sound. The first volume of Oracle Sound is out in October with three deep dubs available to listen to in advance- Lightning Version, Birthday Dub and Sodium Haze. This is dub created from scratch, allowed to unfold over long periods of time, beds of echo and space, ambient/ drone backdrops, kicking rhythms and lovely warm bass. You can find Oracle Sound Volume 1 here. Subscribers to Richard's Bandcamp can get hold of the twenty minute long Shark Tooth Dub, experimental, ambient dub that glides on and on. 

More dub now, of the dubbing out already existing songs variety. Panda Bear and Sonic Youth's album of last year Reset has been dubbed out in full by Adrian Sherwood. The original album was a brightly coloured, sweeter than sugar blast of 60s psyche- pop. Sherwood has applied forty years of dub experience at On U Sound to the songs, re- imaging the songs, breaking them down, smothering them in dub FX, pulling basslines and drums/ percussion to the fore, adding new horns/ melodica lines and adding those cymbal crashes, whirrs, gurgles and thick bottom end.  I could post every/ any version from Reset In Dub but perhaps its best just to go for Getting To the Point Dub.

 

Saturday Live

Sonic Youth are a band who I sometimes have mixed feelings about but there's little doubt that back in 1988 they were heading upwards with a furious punk rock/ art rock energy melding noise and tunes. In October 1988 they released Daydream Nation, a double album opus recorded in July and August of '88, a record that somehow caught the U.S. punk zeitgeist, building on the bands from a decade earlier who laid the foundations- Husker Du, Minutemen, The Replacements, Black Flag et al. Daydream Nation led Sonic Youth to Geffen and their 1990 album Goo and their experience and advice led Nirvana to the same major label. 

The 2007 re- issue of Daydream Nation came with a second CD, live versions of every song on the album recorded as they toured in 1988 and 1989. The songs on the album are a band on a songwriting hot streak, alternate tunings and tight playing fused with melodies and a careering confidence- driving drums, squealing guitars, feedback and distortion, drawled vocals, Sonic Youth giving it their NY punk/ art all while touring venues in the USA and Europe.

Hey Joni (Live at Paradiso, Amsterdam, 1989)

Silver Rocket (Live at Noise Now Festival, Dusseldorf, 1989)

Candle (Live at Cabaret Metro, Chicago, 1988)

Teenage Riot (Live at Paradiso, Amsterdam, 1989)

Total Trash (Live at Maxwell's, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1988)

In 1996 they pitched up at Rockpalast in Germany, the world by that point a different place in punk rock terms and Sonic Youth terms. Sometimes they could play gigs and be so obtuse that it seemed a little pointless. I remember reading a review of them flying to the UK for a single gig at All Tomorrow's Parties (or somewhere similar, one of those festivals) where a usually sympathetic reviewer described them tuning up for an hour and concluded that he couldn't work out why they'd bothered to cross the Atlantic to do this. But here, they do a good job, songs, noise, focus, the 'hits' (Teenage Riot, Bull In The Heather, Sugar Kane). 

Thurston Moore's autobiography is due soon and being well talked about already. It will have to be good to equal Kim Gordon's Girl In A Band which is a superb account of her life and times. The end of their relationship, following Thurston's affair with another woman, led to the end of the band and Kim is pretty open about it in her book. The live version of Bull In the Heather at Rockpalast in '96, Kim at the mic, shows how vital a part of the band she was. No Badger Required has dedicated August to female artists and yesterday featured Kim with a few words from me. You can read it here. 

Day Or Night No One Knows

It's a funny thing- over the years since Daydream Nation came out I've fluctuated in my appreciation of Sonic Youth. Working backwards from Daydream Nation threw up lots to enjoy (Bad Moon Rising, EVOL, Sister) and then forwards as well but with more mixed results. I loved Goo but there are swathes of their albums from the 1990s and 2000s I missed and was fine about missing. I bought and enjoyed NYC Ghosts And Flowers and Murray Street but completely missed and still haven't heard Washing Machine and A Thousand Leaves (both highly rated I think). I sometimes think they seem like style over substance but when they hit the target they hit it good and proper.

Teenage Riot (Live at Paradiso, Amsterdam, 1989)

Thurston Moore doesn't come out of Kim Gordon's 2015 autobiography Girl In A Band too well and he can come across as bit worthy on punk documentaries. I saw him play with his group in Manchester last year. I'd gone along on a whim in a way and was glad I did. It looked interesting, the venue is a former garage across the road from Strangeways prison, MBV's Debbie Googe plays bass in the band and his Spirit Counsel album last year was a good if infrequent listen.  His cover version of New Order's Leave Me Alone had pricked my attention too, a really good take on the song. Sometimes maybe you're just more in tune with things than at other times. Three weeks ago I posted his lockdown release, a nine minute instrumental for three guitars called Strawberry Moon. Last week Thurston announced the release of an album recorded back in March, just before lockdown hit. By The Fire has Debbie on bass and Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley on the drums on some songs plus Jon from Negativland. In advance he put out this single, Hashish. According to Thurston the song is 'an ode to the narcotic of love in our shared responsibility to each other during isolation'. The opening guitar drones and atonal picked notes followed by the thumping drums and wasted vocals are exactly what you'd expect from Thurston Moore and if this had been a few years ago I could easily have shrugged and moved on but right now they are hitting the spot completely.

Isolation Mix Four

A bit of a change again for this week's hour long isolation mix, this time a trip into more psychedelic and psyche areas, some guitars, a couple of cover versions, some remixes and a re-edit of an 80s alt- classic with an eye, a third eye maybe, on the cosmic and the blissed out. One of the segues is a little bit clumsy but I can live with it. I've had to move the host over to Mixcloud as I'd used up all my available space at Soundcloud without going to the paid for service.



Tracklist-
The Durutti Column: Otis

Wixel: Expressway To Yr Skull (Long Champs Bonus Beats)

Moon Duo: Stars Are The Light

Curses: This Is The Day

Le Volume Courbe: Rusty

Sonic Boom/ Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End

Mogwai: Party In The Dark

The Liminanas: The Gift (Anton Mix)

Goldfrapp v Spiritualized: Monster Love

Julian Cope: Heed Of Penetration and the City Dweller Head Remix by Hugo Nicholson

Edit Service 8 by It’s A Fine Line: The Story Of The Blues (Talkin’ Blues)

The Early Years: Complicity

Expressway

There's an album of acoustic guitar cover versions of Sonic Youth songs, all texture and ambience and small hours vibes, by Belgian artist Wixel. It came out back in 2008 and lives on in Wixel's Bandcamp page (Wixel doesn't seem to have released anything since 2013). Welsh outfit The Long Champs have taken Wixel's cover of Expressway To Yr Skull and blissed it out, turning it into a gorgeous, shimmering, meditative haze, perfect for this time of the year. I can't recommend this highly enough, it's sublime. If you move quickly- and I appreciate moving quickly two days after Christmas may be relative- there's a free download.



Wixel's cover versions are worth some of your time too.

Joni's In The Tall Grass

Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation turned 30 this year, a double album that was some kind of apex of US indie-punk. I tested it out this week, seeing how it sounded after not having heard it for years. It's front loaded with Teenage Riot, their most essential song and the few that follow it are almost as good- Silver Rocket, The Sprawl, 'Cross The Breeze and Eric's Trip- but not quite as good. Lee Ranaldo's Hey Joni was the one that stood out to me, a noisy, full throttle tribute to Joni Mitchell (possibly) or a girl from Lee's past (possibly) that breaks down towards the end, twin overdriven  guitars feeding back, with Ranaldo saying 'It's 1963, it's 1964, it's 1957, it's 1962.... put it all behind you, now it's all behind you'. Lost youth.

Hey Joni

Their 1989 cover of Neil Young's Computer Age is a blast and a joy, pretty much my favourite Sonic Youth track (and somehow typical of them to cover a song from Neil's most misunderstood record, his 1982 vocoder and synths album Trans, an album that baffled his fans and record company alike). Sonic Youth rewire it for guitar and burn it up. 

Computer Age

She's A Sad Tomato

Watching an R.E.M. documentary the other night reminded me a) what a good band R.E.M. were in the 80s but also b) how they kept that going into the mainstream- such an unlikely band to be stadium size, multi-million selling albums big. After Automatic For The People I always think they tail off very quickly but the fade was delayed longer than that. I didn't think too much of Monster when it came out but Crush With Eyeliner is really good- it shimmers and throbs and has groove. New Adventures In Hi Fi has several 90s peaks on it too. Being massive and mainstream and still being interesting is a difficult trick to pull off. In retrospect they should have called it a day when Bill Berry left- that would have left everything intact.



Which then led me to this 90s Sonic Youth masterpiece. Sonic Youth crossing over with New York fashion shows and Cara Delevingne in tow. Sonic Youth crossed back pretty quickly.

Girl In A Band

I read Kim Gordon's memoir Girl In A Band last week and very good it was too. The book divides into three main parts: her upbringing in California and her entry onto the world of art in the late 60s and early 70s; her move to New York and the best part of three decades spent in Sonic Youth and married to Thurston Moore; the bringing up a young family of her own while being part of an experimental guitar band and the effects of Thurston Moore's affair and the break up of her marriage. The entire book is cut through with a sense of loss and questioning, as the ramifications of Thurston's actions lead her to re-assess most of what went before. The breakdown of the marriage clearly brings the band to an end- more loss. Her childhood also contained the loss of a brother to mental illness and she constantly questions her relationships- with men, with art, with life. The chapters are often brief but full of insight, a series of postcards from her life. By the 90s the book also brings in a wide supporting cast, including Kurt Cobain (more loss), the New York art and fashion worlds, the gentrification of the city (loss again), Beck, and The Beastie Boys. It's sad in parts, angry and furious in places too, moving but uplifting too as a new Kim emerges at the end. It's a thoroughly affecting read and another first rate female rock autobiography from the last couple of years to hold up alongside Viv Albertine's and Tracey Thorn's books.

Sonic Youth moved from indie to major in the 1990s, having seen the pitfalls of The Replacements and Husker Du doing the same in the 80s and wanted to avoid making the same mistakes. Their output didn't really suffer- Goo (on Geffen) stands up strongly, close to Daydream Nation and their 80s indie-punk classics. Dirty Boots, Kool Thing and Bull In The Heather are all just as good as Teenage Riot (well, almost as good as Teenage Riot), Expressway To Yr Skull and Death Valley '69. They were just recorded in bigger, more expensive studios.

Death Valley '69

Ciccone

In 1988 Sonic Youth put out The Whitey Album, not very well disguised as Ciccone Youth and in tribute to Madonna Louise Ciccone. Most of the attention was on the record's cover versions. These had been put out as a single on New Alliance in 1986 and were expanded out for the album. Coming at a time when Sonic Youth were being praised to the heavens for Daydream Nation this was possibly an effective way of defusing some of the hype- some noise, contributions from Mike Watt, jokey covers plus a hip reference to krautrock with the song Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening To Neu! The cover of the album was a photocopied close up of Madonna's face. Madonna apparently gave her blessing to it, remembering the band from her clubbing and Danceteria days. Ciccone Youth did their Madonna thing on Into The Groove(y) and Burnin' Up. Someone on Youtube has done the decent thing and set the music to clips of Desperately Seeking Susan (the only Madonna film that is actually watchable).



Better still though was their version of Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love. The video and vocal were recorded in a karaoke booth for $25- D.I.Y. punk rock in attitude, style and cost. It was also a very effective way of sending up Palmer's video with Kim Gordon singing the song deadpan and dancing with images from the Vietnam War flashing over the top.



This is the standard setter and last word in ironic cover versions. And still sounds great.

Keeping It Peel

October 25th is Keeping It Peel Day across the internet. I've taken part previously- the sound of John Peel's voice followed by something familiar and brilliant, or unfamiliar and brilliant, or just plain puzzling, was one of the joys of the man's radio show. In previous years I've posted Keeping It Peel songs by Half Man Half Biscuit, The Redskins and Sabres Of Paradise. I dallied briefly with posting a song from The Cramps only Peel Session but we've had a surfeit of Crampiness in recent weeks- not that you can have too much but I thought some of you might be getting bored- and when searching my d/ls folder found this, Sonic Youth covering The Fall's Rowche Rumble...

Rowche Rumble (Peel Session)

And also this from long lost blissed out, groovy, Balearic dance act Fluke, who I always had a soft spot for...

The Allotment of Blighty (Peel Session)

The two together, I think, kind of covers some of the spirit of the man and the radio show.

Everybody's Talking 'Bout The Stormy Weather

So we skip seamlessly from Big Youth to Sonic Youth. I've got several Sonic Youth records but when it comes down to it the only one I need is the opening song from their 1987 double opus Daydream Nation, an album that seemed to signpost a new big thing. Fact is, whenever I think I'm going to listen to Daydream Nation I never get any further than playing Teen Age Riot three or four times. That's not to say that the rest of the album hasn't got anything going for it- it has- but the rest of it isn't Teen Age Riot. It's Sonic Youth's perfect moment. I can make a case for Death Valley '69 and much of Goo (I love Dirty Boots) and some later stuff like Murray Street and also some of Ciccone Youth (they've got a good way with covers- their versions Neil Young's Computer Age and the Carpenters' Superstar are both superb). But Teen Age Riot is head and shoulders above- from it's smoky intro with Kim Gordon intoning blankly to the riff and then Thurston's half-spoken, half-sung vocals, a tribute to sloth king J Mascis, and the whole effortlessness, pre-slacker controlled noise of it all. US indie-punk cool.

Teen Age Riot

Of course sometimes they're insufferable obtuse as well, noise-for-noise's sake, music from the head rather than the heart or the loins. Record collectors and rock critics let loose in an instrument shop. I suppose I shouldn't carp- many bands don't make one song that'll be remembered twenty five years after it was recorded.

Hang On To Your Detuned Guitars

Sonic Youth do their Sonic Youth thing to I Know There's An Answer, a song off The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which as everyone knows is one of the greatest albums since blah blah. This is pretty good actually, nicely ramshackle.

I Know There's An Answer started life as a song called Hang On To Your Ego, which some members of the Beach Boys refused to sing claiming it was hippy nonsense. Which it probably was. Doesn't make them right to make Brian go and change it though does it?

I Know There's An Answer

Your Guitar, It Sounds So Sweet And Clear

Sonic Youth cover The Carpenters for a 1994 tribute album. Thurston Moore and his merry noiseniks eschew the usual noise, walls of detuned guitars and wilfullness for space and texture. You can hear the amps humming, the backdrop of electricity and buckets of atmosphere, big bass piano notes and a whispered vocal about love for a pop star. Sublime.

Sonic Youth Superstar.mp3

I Feel Like More Than Just A Number

Back in the late 80s there was a brief rash of tribute albums. Usually British and US indie/alternative acts recorded covers by a 60s artist, with mixed results. There was a Byrds one, a Hendrix one and a couple of Velvets ones (which included an pre-fame Nirvana cover). The best/only good one was The Bridge- a Tribute to Neil Young. As well as the song featured here it had Nick Cave, The Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr, Pixies, Loop, Soul Asylum and Psychic TV (who did a Balaeric cover of Only Love Can Break Your Heart before St Etienne did). This song may have been the pick of the bunch though- Sonic Youth doing Computer Age.

Typically contrary and wilfully obscure, given all of Neil Young's back catalogue to have a go at Sonic Youth chose to tackle a song from Trans, Neil's massively uncommercial, completely misunderstood and (to his rock audience) bizarre synth and vocoder album from 1982. Not known at the time Trans came out of Neil attempting to communicate with his disabled son using the vocoder. Neil also frequently tried to sidestep either his audience or record company or both. With Trans he did that with knobs on.

Coming off the back of their 1988 sprawling classic Daydream Nation Sonic Youth take a synthy/vocoder song and do what would have happened if Neil had recorded it with Crazy Horse- turn the guitars and amps up and kick the living daylights out of it.

Computer Age.mp3