Curses. I've been looking forward to this album cropping up on Music Arcades for… years — especially when ploughing my way through the several lacklustre Sonic Youth albums I have. You can see me hinting at this anticipation at the end of this post and the beginning of this one.
And then it arrives in the middle of a week that's been greatly disrupted by an ill Boy, a bit of snow (adding hours to journey time for even short distances, and meaning nursery closed two hours early today), and being behind my work targets. So I haven't been able to soak in every inch of the album in the way I'd hoped.
A Thousand Leaves is an album I want to drink in in long, slow sips. Especially the long, slow songs, that bumble along like a seriously stoned (and poorly tuned) Crazy Horse without ever sounding lazy or complacent. In the context of these warm meditations even the songs that Kim sings — which are invariably my least favourite on SY albums (sorry!) — provide just the right amount of grit to prevent the whole being too sweet.
Some people look at me blankly when I say this is clsoe to being my favourite SY album, but I see Robert Christgau agreed, in a review which I can't help nodding along with:
This record is what it seems — mature, leisurely, rather beautiful, perhaps content. But it's neither complacent nor same-old, and after it's settled into their, I'm sorry, oeuvre, it will rank toward the top for everybody except permanent revolutionaries, a noncombatant category if ever there was one. Awash in connubial ardor and childhood bliss, undergirded by the strength-through-strangeness of angry tunings grown familiar, it's the music of a daydream nation old enough to treasure whatever time it finds on its hands. Where a decade ago they plunged and plodded, drunk on the forward notion of the van they were stuck in, here they wander at will, dazzled by sunshine, greenery, hoarfrost, and machines that go squish in the night. The melodies aren't the foci of the 11-tracks-in-74-minutes — more like resting places. But even when the band is punk-rocking le sexisme or pondering the trippy fate of Karen Koltrane, the anxiety the tunes alleviate is never life-threatening. Motto, and they quote: "'We'll know where when we get there.'" A+
As with many of my favourite albums, I have one abiding memory of listening to it. Recall my story of playing nothing but Galaxie 500 in my car for a year — with one exception. That exception was when Tim and I drove back from Gatwick to Sheffield after a few days in Barcelona. We started at 3am, and got home around 7am (still dark: it was this time of the year). At that time in the morning, the M25 round Heathrow was emptier than I've ever seen it, and Hits of Sunshine, played loud, sounded more glorious than ever.
I'd mostly stopped buying Sonic Youth albums during the nineties. I don't know what triggered me to go back to them and check out this one, but it was A Thousand Leaves that made me think it was worth exploring the albums before it, and a few of those that followed it. Wrongly, as it turned out, but let's not hold that against it. Now, it's 11.10pm and I'm off to listen to Hits of Sunshine all the way through on headphones before bed.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
I have this album on my media player. I always thought the band became dull after "Dirty," as though they'd spent themselves. Might give this one another listen.
Posted by: M.J. Nicholls | 03 December 2010 at 04:47 PM