Sonic Youth Thousand Leaves Rar
By 1998, underground music’s unlikely liaison with the mainstream had thoroughly soured. The gold rush of six years earlier, begun when Nirvana gatecrashed the charts with Nevermind, seemed several lifetimes away, though the rot had begun even before Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide. Sonic Youth correctly surmised they had more leeway with their label than the newer kids on the block, and were beginning to stretch their wings. “We’re in a pretty lucky situation, because by the time we were signed we were already pretty well established,” guitarist Lee Ranaldo said during a 1998 interview with ace Aussie kids’ TV show Recovery. “So the label realised if they did anything other than let us be, It would screw up a good thing.”In the months approaching the release of their 14th full-length, A Thousand Leaves, Sonic Youth released a pair of instrumental EPs, hewn from early sessions for the new record. The first releases on the group’s own Sonic Youth Records imprint, 1997’s SYR1: Anagrama and SYR2: Slaapkamers Met Slagroom, served as bulletins from the sessions for A Thousand Leaves, cut at their new studio Echo Canyon, located on Murray Street, near the World Trade Centre. The roiling, open-ended sturm-und-drang of these EPs set the scene for the album that would follow, not that the media paid much attention to them.
It’s hard to imagine music less fashionable than that being made by Sonic Youth in 1997, but, as Ranaldo told Recovery, “We just try to focus on the music and not let the business or the trends or whatever’s happening get in the way.”By building their own studio, and starting their own record label, Sonic Youth were explicitly securing themselves the freedom to do whatever they want. These were no spoiled, haywire 20-somethings looking for something to rebel against, but 30- and 40-something parents, with mortgages, and a desire to keep pursuing a path they fought hard to reach.The music on those EPs was, by turns, exultant, maddening, enigmatic, inspired and mystifying. The album that followed was much the same, an uncompromising set that was easy with being hard to love, but harboured brilliance within its obscure corners. It opened in the spirit of an album begging you not to listen to it, with ‘Contre Le Sexisme’, four minutes of sonic vapour, over which Kim Gordon murmured impenetrable poetry. It isn’t the last time A Thousand Leaves will try your patience, but ‘Contre Le Sexisme’ offers precious little reward.Patience is a virtue the album often demands of the listener.
Sonic Youth Thousand Leaves Rar
Sure, Washing Machine had boasted a ten-minute title track and a twenty-minute closer, the celestial ‘The Diamond Sea’, but A Thousand Leaves is wilfully leisurely, and as with everything about this most wilful album, its a quality that ultimately seduces those susceptible to its charms. The centrepiece, ‘Hits Of Sunshine’, jams languidly for over eleven minutes, its pulse slower than a heartbeat, its tendrils of psychedelic guitar purposefully evading focus, tacitly acknowledging that these one-time art-punk guitarrorists harboured at least one Deadhead, Lee Ranaldo, among their ranks (indeed, Thurston Moore joked in Index magazine in 1998 that Sonic Youth were planning on touring with 90s Deadhead revivalists Phish, saying “flower hippies are the only way we’re going to make money in the future”).
But the text of the song – at one point mooted as the album’s title track – cites another important reference point: Allen Ginsberg, who had died the previous spring. From the perspective of 20 years on, knowing the paths Sonic Youth subsequently took, and Moore’s latter-day focus on poetry, the song feels like a gesture of purpose, redrawing their context, transposing themselves from the Lollapalooza world of alternateens and skateboard-themed MTV promos to a boho beatnik milieu that’s doubtless more where they belonged now.Elsewhere, A Thousand Leaves saw SY further explore the loose, jammy vibe of ‘Hits Of Sunshine’ with more focus.