Music Arcades: Sonic Youth: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

As with yesterday's album, the final track on EJSTaNS does that thing that baddies in naff thriller movies of the period always did: seems to be dead, and then, just as you're shifting your attention elsewhere, it lurches back into view with one last spasm. Evidently it was an early '90s fad. There are only two albums that do the CD "run out groove" successfully: Hit to Death in the Future Head and one other that hasn't cropped up here yet (hint: Stephin Merritt is involved; can you guess which one it is).

In my personal scheme of things, there are some Sonic Youth albums that hit the spot with an accuracy that makes them the definitive avant-rock band. More definitive, though not necessarily better, than Pere Ubu or the Velvet Underground. Can you tell when I'm trying to be controversial? I'm not very convincing, I know — truth is, I'm not really bothered who's 'more definitive' or 'better'. Anyway, there are also some Sonic Youth albums that don't hit the spot, and this, along with Dirty, is one of those.

I didn't buy it until the dark days of August 1999, five years after it came it out, persuaded by it being in the first wave of the fiver from Fopp revolution. At that time, I remember listening to Tokyo Eye on my portable mini-disc player while wandering around Sheffield — actually the specific memory I have is of listening while crossing the footbridge over Porter Brook at the foot of Frog Walk; don't ask me why. In those early post-cassette days when compiling your own playlists was becoming much easier, I harboured a plan to make a mini-disc comprising tracks that sidle along quietly for a few minutes and then burst unexpectedly into full-on assault. It was going to have Tokyo Eye on it, that Wedding Present song from Sea Monster, probably Neil Young's Don't Cry and… well, I think I got stuck there, and that's why I never got round to it. Good idea, though. In principle.

In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader, now there's a track title to revel in — up there with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Ballboy and Alasdair Roberts in the title Hall of Fame.