Sonic Youth—under the counter, over the top
In 1986 what might be the ultimate Sonic Youth album appeared: Walls Have Ears, a double LP that while not as dangerous as Kim Gordon's tracks on Confusion Is Sex (1983) or as artful-playful as Goo (1990) mapped the territory they meant to occupy and tear up more fully than anything else they put out. Except they didn't: it was a bootleg. It only took 38 years to see the light of day: it will be out in February as an official release on Goofin' Records. Below is what I wrote about it when it first began turning up in punk record stores, from the Summer 1986 issue of Artforum.
Sonic Youth tries to start fires in a field of corn. Their name is pure corn; their new signature tune, “Expressway to Yr. Skull,” combines corny punk misogyny with ’60s psychedelia, and nothing could be cornier than that—when I first heard the song, the words drowned in nightclub acoustics, I thought it might be a cover of the Amboy Dukes’ 1968 Korn Klassic, “Journey to the Center of the Mind.” The way “Expressway” trails out of a noise rave-up with quiet feedback drifting into silence is as corny as the surge of suspense music when the detective stumbles on the body in a third-rate murder movie.