Music Arcades: Sonic Youth: Sister

From my twelve Sonic Youth albums (and one EP), random selection has kept until last what are probably my favourite three. Sadly Google doesn't index Music Arcades perfectly at the moment, but here are a few of those featured so far.

This is the first of the three, and it's where I picked up the Sonic Youth story in 1987. Funny, I thought John Peel had been playing them for a while by then, and perhaps he had, but that the was the first year Sonic Youth featured in the Festive 50, and they didn't do a Peel session until the year after. Pacific Coast Highway is the track I remember hearing on his show. I wasn't that keen on the beginning and end of the tracks, but the middle bit reminded me of Zuma-era Crazy Horse, in a good way (cf. the likes of Green on Red, who, around the same time, reminded me of the elements of Zuma I don't like).

And Sonic Youth repaid the compliment. I have to admit that, though I'd been a big Neil Young fan for over five years by 1987, I mostly cleaved to the non-Horse (unsaddled?) side of his work. After Sonic Youth had given my ears a working over, they (the ears) were opened to the wonders of the Horse.

It's hard to imagine quite how I felt about Sister when I first heard it. I don't think it it was an immediate hit — more of a grower. It took a while to get to grips with the odd tunings, to discern the nature of the intelligence, as well as how and why that intelligence was slumming it. The Pixies, Galaxie 500 and the arch hanging-on-to-Sonic-Youth-coattails Nirvana were still a year or two away from making their presence felt. Here was a band whose cover art collage hinted at similar cerebral obsessions as you got with Talking Heads, but they made them dirty. Their hips didn't move with that marionette wiggle that Byrne does — much more feral, animal, and unhinged.

And I think it was that sense of a rock music that had slipped its moorings that carried me back to Crazy Horse, newly open to the pleasures of what they do.

After my first listen a few days ago, I thought I'd treat myself to another dip into the albums best bits yesterday afternoon. I started with Schizophrenia, Track 1, because that's always been a favourite, with the intention of skipping forward a track whenever I got bored. Thus I ended up listening all the way through (excepting Master-Dik, which I count as a bonus track, and had my fill of three months ago). We all know that bands hide their worst song in the penultimate slot on the running order, because most listeners have turned off mentally or literally by then. The penultimate song on Sister is Cotton Crown, a belter in my book — and covered to advantage (as Peel would have said) by Charlotte Greig.