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April 20, 2009
The Eternal Wait
The wee small hours of this morning saw the digital dispersal of the first heard track from the next Sonic Youth record, the Kim Gordon-centric "Sacred Trickster." Given the levels of anticipation for that LP around MS HQ, this has inflamed an already raging itch to hear the thing. Sonic Youth have had an improbably stellar late-career renaissance in the 00s, and with perpetually grinning Pavement bassist Mark Ibold now installed as a full-fledged recording member, there's very little reason to believe the Golden Age of their golden years won't continue, unabated. So, as a salve for our collective lack of patience (a systemic dilemma, these days) I offer a couple SY trifles, flung to the 'net from someone's hoarded hauls of this weekend's Record Store Day. The 2500 physical copies of these split Beck/Sonic Youth and Jay Reatard/Sonic Youth are now long, long gone...
Sonic Youth - "Pay No Mind" (Beck cover)
On Mellow Gold and earlier, Beck mitigated his ridiculous lyrics by delivering them in a hilariously earnest folk-singer fashion. Maybe "a giant dildo crushing the sun" was some sort of Woody Guthrie anti-fascist metaphor? Here, initially backed up by nothing more than some squirming static distortion, "Pay No Mind" seems ludicrous and sinister. Kim Gordon's aggressive whisper is particularly unsettling. Drums kick in soon enough, along with feedback that sounds like a whistling tea kettle and finally some properly nasty guitars. The added instruments give the silly lines some of their conviction back, and they sound like they might mean a little bit of something, after all. Hearing Thurston rasp that "the drugs won't kill your day job," has a particular ring of truth to it (though I can think of quite a few day jobs that the drugs might actually kill).
"No Garage" is even less essential than the cover above, but what the hell. You interested in hearing SY just riff and riff and riff in a primitive manner, while occasionally snapping into dark, catchy guitar rock bursts? At least a little, right?
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Sonic Youth's 16th studio record, The Eternal, is out on June 9th, for the first time via Matador Records. If you buy it now though, you can listen in a week and a day.
Posted by Jeff Klingman at April 20, 2009 11:15 AM
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