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IVH: Sonic Youth / EVOL [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-28

Tonight’s selections from NYC Lower East Side rockers Sonic Youth’s 1986 album, EVOL. An album that played a formative role in young Al Dorado’s aesthetic development. While Daydream Nation is rightfully considered the pinnacle of 1980s Sonic Youth; that double album couldn’t have been made without the exploratory and transitional albums of EVOL and Sister.

EVOL, the band’s sordid third LP, released in 1986, was their first of two pivotal albums for SST. Sonic Youth began to fuse with lawless West Coast punk: Minutemen and Black Flag versus sadistic cops and sun-bleached strip-mall banality. This ultimately showed how unmistakably East Village the Sonic Youth camp was. Sonic Youth was subterranean subway clangor; windowless bohemia; a fast-walking stomp on a sidewalk grate; the hallowed doors of Trash & Vaudeville; a secret. As if to assert their Downtown identity, the album opens with the somnambulant churn of “Tom Violence,” a song inspired by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which narrates a classic renegade pose. In her liner notes to the 1993 CD edition, transgressive zine writer Lisa Suckdog quoted Moore’s lyrics: “‘I left home for experience’—me, too!’” [...] [It] was not just a skewering of rock’n’roll but also of America. A college syllabus could revolve around its vast allusions to Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, The Great Gatsby, and Alfred Hitchcock. EVOL might have a cheeky Richard Kern horror-film still on the cover, it might feel like the most dissonant passages of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star held captive and tormented in a cavernous haunted house, but the album was beyond a “faux-goth” record, as Gordon once described it. EVOL is a graveyard for 1960s peace-and-love idealism. (The title is “love” backwards.) The destructive force of no wave and hardcore was cast as a new kind of sonic conceptual art. [...] EVOL has a seductive, uncanny ease, which makes its violent undercurrents even more frightening. It was Sonic Youth’s first record to feature new drummer/hardcore kid Steve Shelley, previously of the Crucifucks, and their atmospheric songs could newly thunder and pop. EVOL has enthralling hooks—this was around the time [bassist, Kim] Gordon recorded “Addicted to Love” in a karaoke booth for The Whitey Album—albeit skewed ones, pop songs trudging uphill, carrying the weight of their own dread. Sonic Youth’s tilted cover of Kim Fowley’s cheap “Bubblegum” has only grown seamier with time. With a twisted hop, “Star Power” was inspired by the unbelievable 1970s Star magazine, which was aimed at underage groupies: “She knows how to make love to me,” Gordon sings. The equally poppy “Green Light” borrows one of The Great Gatsby’s major recurring images, a symbol of the American Dream. Sonic Youth’s racket implicitly subverts that. — Pitchfork

Shadow of a Doubt

Recording sessions for EVOL began in February, 1986. Working once again with Martin Bisi, who had recorded their previous album, Bad Moon Rising, the engineer was bemused by the truckload of guitars which were delivered to his Brooklyn studio. By this time, Sonic Youth had perfected the art of alternative tunings and each of the battered, cheapo guitars was specifically tailored to an individual song. Derived in part from their participation in Glenn Branca’s massive electric guitar symphonies, [Thurston] Moore and bandmate Lee Ranaldo took the concept of non-conventional tunings into the realm of punk rock, jamming screwdrivers between the frets and banging the strings with mallets to create a clangorously beautiful soundworld uniquely their own. From gentle, koto-like plucking to weirdly ringing chord progressions to the whorling sound of an electrified, psychedelic gamelan, Sonic Youth was creating guitar music like no other. EVOL would be their first fully realized statement. EVOL also marked the first appearance of new drummer, Steve Shelley, whose impact would be subtle but profound. Sonic Youth had struggled with a string of less-than-totally satisfactory drummers in their previous history, including Richard Edson, Jim Sclavunos and, most recently, Bob Bert. When Bert unexpectedly quit the band at the end of their 1985 European tour, Shelley (who at the time was housesitting for Moore and his wife, bassist Kim Gordon) was invited to join without so much as an audition. Already known for his work with the Crucifucks, a riotous hardcore band from his native Michigan, Shelley brought precise timekeeping and reliable professionalism to the drumstool for the first time. From opening song, “Tom Violence,” his presence is immediately felt, the pummeling tom-toms belying his meek, bespectacled countenance. [...] Sonic Youth would make one more album for SST, the even more listener-friendly Sister (1987), but relations with the label quickly soured. Accused by the band of refusing to pay royalties while massively expanding their release schedule—at one point releasing a preposterous 80 albums in one year—SST eventually collapsed under the weight of their own success. The band later sued for return of their masters and the distinctive SST logo no longer graces the cover of the currently available editions. In retrospect, EVOL was a transitional album; they would certainly go on to bigger and better things, eventually signing with a major label in 1989. But EVOL remains one of my favorite records. It reminds me of a time when punk rock seemed to matter, as a reproach to the greed and cynicism of Reaganomics and an antidote to the bland, conservative synthpop of the era. No band of that time was as artistically adventurous as Sonic Youth and no label mattered more than SST. They were out to change the world—and they succeeded, to some degree. EVOL represents the first mature Sonic Youth album and still sounds as fresh as it did then. Sure, they made better records in later years, but none of them felt as important as this one. — Spectrum Culture

Star Power

“In the Kingdom #19” is the most active song on the album just for how chaotic it is. It’s also the first time Lee Ranaldo actually mattered, beginning a tradition of Ranaldo having a song to himself per album, with the exception of Daydream Nation having three songs with him on lead vocals. Ranaldo shows sensibilities in his writing that differ strongly from Moore and Gordon; where they either rhymed or at least sang with a particular meter, Ranaldo deals in free verse. The song is about a motor accident, the subject most likely being Minutemen frontman D. Boon, considering that the Minutemen’s bassist Mike Watt features here; in fact, this was among his first recordings since Boon’s untimely demise, because he would’ve quit music if it weren’t for Sonic Youth requesting his presence. Though the lyrics are somewhat obtuse because it’s a Sonic Youth song, the music says just as much as Ranaldo in its own way, opening with unmoored improvisation and Steve Shelley threatening to reach King Crimson levels of madness. Then it settles into a punk groove, simulating being on the road, and there’s also a great moment where Moore throws firecrackers into the recording booth and scares the shit out of Ranaldo; the resultant scream feels completely natural to the music, and you can also hear the crackers going off. Next, there’s feedback and amp abuse as the narrator tries to save himself, ending off on a dissonant Birthday Party-esque jam as his ghost haunts the highway. — Sputnik Music

In the Kingdom #19

“Expressway to Yr. Skull” (also referred to as “Madonna, Sean and Me” on the back cover of Evol, and “The Crucifixion of Sean Penn” on the lyric sheet) remains as one of my all-time favorite songs from Sonic Youth across their decades of studio releases. This track perfectly captures the turning point of Sonic Youth from no-wave chaos into a more polished product that is just as gripping and substantially more pleasing to listen to. The first half of the song sounds like something from a cursed road trip to Hell — the manic squealing of Ranaldo’s 12-string slide guitar is equal parts unnerving and suspiciously enjoyable. The second half of the song breaks down into a demonstration of pure noise, but the connection of the two elements is what never fails to impress me the most. Despite its monotonous length, “Expressway to Yr. Skull” is not a complete song without having listened to both parts. The ability to watch Sonic Youth perform this track live only makes the back half more enjoyable; watching Lee Ranaldo drag the head stock of his 12-string guitar across the floor to get just the right amount of feedback and reverberation through the instrument is a special sight to witness. — Joshua English/Medium

Neil Young said “Expressway to Yr. Skull” was the best guitar song ever written. When Sonic Youth opened for Young on tour, he liked to stretch under the stage while they jammed it. EVOL ends with the barrage of its epic seven-minute sprawl: If noise has ever sounded more arresting, this controlled chaos could erase your memory. “We’re gonna kill the California girls [...] We’re gonna find the meaning of feeling good,” Thurston sings laconically, like Brian Wilson on bad acid, mixing classic Fugs-like New York antagonism with the nihilism and hedonism of Los Angeles. Any question of whether EVOL belongs in the pantheon of New York rock is obliterated by that grenade of a lyric. It is EVOL’s neat concluding paragraph, and no less than when Moore makes an overt reference to critic Greil Marcus’ marvel of rock’n’roll history, Mystery Train, his groundbreaking 1975 book. “Mystery train/Three-way plane/Expressway to your skull,” Moore sings, before a burst of squalling cacophony gives way to ambient noise, minimalism, and space. Rock history is collapsing onto itself, derailing, but then so is American history, American culture. — Pitchfork

Expressway to Yr. Skull

It’s Side Two where Sonic Youth come into their brazen, idiosyncratic own. Conjuring images of NYC psychosis and small-town ennui, Moore, Gordon, Ranaldo and Shelley concoct some of their most vital moments pre-Daydream Nation over 20 minutes. Where ‘Marilyn Moore’ and ‘Secret Girl’ make for masterfully mumbled forays into the doldrums of psychic regression, ‘Expressway To Yr. Skull’ is a first-rate eleven-minute experiment in locked-vinyl drone. Better Still, ‘In The Kingdom #19’ pairs Minutemen bassist Mike Watt with Ranaldo’s stream-of-conscious poetry and one exquisite, furiously-maneuvered racket. Though a departure from the relative linearity of Side One, the more drawn-out explorations towards the end are almost certainly the upshot of pure, single-minded focus - not aimless trial-and-error. Thirty-two years on, EVOL has every claim to being called Sonic Youth's mostly deftly atmospheric release. Haunting and dazzling, unknowable yet oddly familiar, its alternate-tuned twists and turns bound forth like the best soundtrack to some lost, low-budget B-movie. With the full extent of their craft on the cusp of being revealed, upon release, these ten dimly-lit trips forged backwashed imagery of 60s counterculture, Californian doom, 80s celebrity and industrial desolation into one brilliantly brooding, darkly gorgeous fever dream that spooks and consoles in perfect synchronicity. — Drowned in Sound

Bubblegum



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