Not that it was all praises and hosannas for this kind of screek/skronk music -- Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau famously dissmissed SY and fellow mavericks Big Black and Butthole Surfers as 'pigfucker' music -- a label not particularly appreciated by SY but in retrospect seems to have a certain je ne sais quoi!
The review below was written for SY's first appearance in Denver. Loud, sweaty and packed, it was a great show with two outstanding local bands, Happy World and Cage of Reason, opening the festivities.
The SY part of the night can be heard on the band's Bandcamp page -- it's a stunner, a real pigfucker, if you'll excuse the term.
(see link to page below)
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Euphonic Sonic Youth
by Duane Davis
Front Row//Art & Noise, August 1986
(Life On Capitol Hill?)
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Tom Headbanger and Michael Sidlow don't promote shows: oh, they contact the bands, sign the contracts, get the sound system and electrical incidentals, paper the town with flyers of astounding bad taste, hustle free publicity, find a venue, arrange transportation for a variety of seedy characters in various states of consciousness, cajole opening acts into playing in front of ten people for a handshake and a grin, and even find couch or two on which the out-of-towners can crash.
But all that is secondary. What they really promote in Attitude -- a double helix smirk with a twisted geometry that leaves you confused as to just where you stand: on the inside or the outside, with it or without it, somewhere or nowhere. The great adventure of the two hundred or more shows Tom has put on starts when you get in the car to go to the show: is this really the night the band is going to appear? or even be in the state? is this the bar, club, hall, art space, basement, street corner both you and the band will eventually co-inhabit? will the temperature (hot or cold) be within the range of tolerances for human existence? will the PA system sound like two thousand gerbils trying to get out of Chernobyl at the instant of thermonuclear meltdown? will a dozen skinheads pulp your date into a smear of strawberry jam? and, ultimately, will tonight be just another story or a good time?
On July 12th, Tom and Michael invited greater metropolitan Denver, its surrounding environs as well as a few select guests from Boulder, Colorado Springs and more mysterious points on the compass down to the German House at 1570 Clarkson to watch local bands Happy World and Cage of Reason warm up the stage for New York's Sonic Youth. About four hundred people took up the invitation -- it is rumored some of them weren't even on the guest list.
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| Happy World |
Happy World have been knocking about for a few years now and, to date, have two 7" ep's, an album and a couple of out-of-state tours to their credit. They play a bent metal hardcore tempered with enough humor and talent to allow even casual listeners access to the music. As a trio, their playing is thick, precise and loud: a sound that tears out of the PA and into the ear with minimum fuss and maximum damage.
Cage of Reason, up next, bring an extraordinary proficiency to the articulation of disaster. What I like most about the band is the balance of rigor and license they achieve. Guitarist Mike Johnson is an obvious gadget freak, standing on stage surrounded by a bunker of technologically sophisticated devices that have no other purpose than to twist the normalcies of sound into perversions of noise that coincide with what we need to hear rather than what we might want to hear. Every time you mentally reach for a knob to adjust the sound, Mike's hand is already there redefining the contours of the music into a deconstructed chromatics of unstable chords and frayed leads.
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| Cage of Reason |
Susanne Lewis is not simply a vocalist: she is a voice overwhelmed by the syntax of desperation, a disjointed and disengaged utterance that glides with deceptive ease between the bodies of melody and the bodies of madness. Behind Mike and Susanne, the bass and drum are in the constant motion of setting, breaking and re-setting the bones of rhythm, a knitting and unraveling that exhausts the listener by its confusion of intent and purpose. What emerges is a music of process, an incomplete object perpetually falling into and out of the world: decay and regeneration, psychosis and rehabilitation, disorder and the symmetries of terror, madness and desire. These individuals comprise what may be the best band in Denver: don't cheat yourself -- see them now.
Sonic Youth were a genuine surprise -- the kind of band that actually redeems the New York Art Damage Scene. The group's roots swarm in a shallow and febrile humus that incorporates elements as (dis)similar as the Velvet Underground, John Cage, Glen Branca and Patti Smith. For a band with their reputation, press coverage, tour experience and vinyl output (three lp's, two mini-lp’s, a couple of 12" ep's, a handful of singles and a scattering of cuts on various compilations), Sonic Youth were astonishingly unpretentious, assuming the stage in a manner and dress not particularly different from the food stamp line at Denver Social Services on a hot afternoon in July.
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| Sonic Youth |
Sonic Youth's strengths lie in a disassembled harmonics, a harrowed tonality, a hemorrhaged euphony that erupts from guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's frenzied attacks on their instruments with screwdrivers and drum sticks. There is a basic pattern of alternating calm and chaos to most of the songs, a casual but carefully planned orchestration of crisis and catharsis that pulls the listener into a kind of participatory seizure.
There is a persuasive theory that music's power derives from its association with the ritual sacrifices practiced by early man as a defense against a disorderly and hostile world. Assuming society's ills and guilts, the victim's body, by its destruction, renewed the unities of civil cohesion so necessary to the survival of the culture. Music mimics this basic human process by structuring sound into a wordless drama capable of resolving the tensions of fragmentation and eruption into a pattern in which conflict yields to resolution. Sonic Youth skirt the borders of this territory, building and layering music from the scrap heap of noises usually denied a role in Western harmony and melody. The band dissolves the carefully drawn demarcation between deviance and normalcy by creating a music at once pathological and restorative.
On stage, the members of Sonic Youth work hard, throwing themselves into each number with a reckless abandon that invites the audience into a dangerous dance that has as its goal the putting at risk of body and heart -- and immersion in a tangled and fragmented ritual compounded of resistance and acceptance.
It was a good story. And a good time.
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