Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star on LP

Following an unprecedented run of influential albums like Daydream Nation (1988), Goo (1990) and Dirty (1992) which marked Sonic Youth's ascent to becoming America's pre-eminent alternative band, the group issued Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star in 1994, an uncompromising record impacted as much by touring with acts like Royal Trux, Sebadoh and Pavement as contemporaries like Nirvana and Mudhoney had swayed the sound of its predecessors.

Produced by Butch Vig yet as stripped down as ever, Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star saw the band simultaneously evolving and yearning for their pre-grunge art band days and less expectations, still just as interested in making remarkable underground sounds as songs with commercial appeal. Thurston Moore explained its synthesis, "The idea this time was to cut as much of it live as we could, and not labor over polishing and overdubbing in the usual big-rock manner, and that's basically what went down."

1. Winner's Blues
2. Bull In The Heather
3. Starfield Road
4. Skink
5. Screaming Skull
6. Self-Obsessed And Sexxee
7. Bone
8. Androgynous Mind
9. Quest For The Cup
10. Waist
11. Doctor's Orders
12. Tokyo Eye
13. In The Mind Of The Bourgeois Reader
14. Sweet Shine

Cyberpunk. Karen Carpenter. A date with Mary Christ. The hypnogogic state. Go-carts. Deconstruction. UFO's. Rap misogyny. Joan Crawford. Marriage. A teenage girl named Goo. In the primordial soup that is Sonic Youth, one of the most critically-acclaimed underground bands of all-time, the above is just some of the musical fodder for 1990's Goo, the band's seventh album and first on a major label (DGC Records).

Mixing American myth and pop images with alternative ideas about music in a great cosmic blender, Sonic Youth is truly, ultimately, progressive rock - bold and daring, stretching pop to it's limits, unique and transcendent. "It's important that people know that music is a free thing," explained guitarist Thurston Mooore, "and not to be dictated by anyone."

Sonic Youth doesn't throw away the rock cliches here, they reshape them. With skewed, mangled guitar tunings, and lyrical jump cuts, Sonic Youth's songs aren't the sound of things falling apart but rather of them getting put back together. A landmark album in the history of alternative rock, with Goo Sonic Youth put it all together all right and genre classics like "Dirty Boots," "Kool Thing," and "Mote" are representative of some of the finest work of the band's trailblazing career and the '90s in general.

Tracks

1. Dirty Boots
2. Tunic (Song For Karen)
3. Mary-Christ
4. Kool Thing
5. Mote
6. My Friend Goo
7. Disappearer
8. Mildred Pierce
9. Cinderella's Big Score
10. Scooter & Jinx
11. Titanium Expose

Murray Street is Sonic Youth's twelfth full-length studio effort and first to feature the all-out collaboration (writing, playing and production) of the great Jim O'Rourke. Named after the New York street where the band's studio was situated and where a plane engine landed on September 11, 2001, Murray Street finds the band building their signature avant garde explorations within a more song oriented framework. The results are obliquely melancholic yet tuneful and the album moves effortlessly and enjoyably between tones, structures, textures and melodies with new found purpose and precision. Songs like "The Empty Page," "Disconnection Notice," and "Rain On Tin") easily hold their own among the many highlights in SY's vast and varied catalog.

1. The Empty Page
2. Disconnection Notice
3. Karen Revisited
4. Rain On Tin
5. Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style
6. Plastic Sun
7. Sympathy For The Strawberry