Perhaps not the best, but still a band well worth paying attention to. Goes without saying that I've ordered this album already, unheard.
Sonic Youth: The Best Band in the Universe The best band in the universe do their Brecht thing with hooks (By Robert Christgau)Forget “edge,” or whatever the edgy are calling it these days. I wish we could forget their non-youth in the bargain, but that wheeze will remain with us—they create from what they know. So let me put it this way: Sonic Youth are the best band in the universe, and if you can't get behind that, that's your problem.
...
One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art....
What matters to me is how these unresolved intimations are allayed and disarmed by the uncharacteristic lightness of music that nevertheless gets strange when you listen hard.Edges dull; the shock of the new gets old. But great bands keep creating from what they know, and figuring it out as they do. Try to see 'em at CB's Tuesday. They'll come up with something you don't expect, guaranteed.
Salon recently made available a track for download
This is the first single from “Rather Ripped,” the upcoming record from the veteran alt-rock heroes, their cool factor magically untarnished by age and changing fashions. They're at their tightest and most focused here, and glossy too, with those inimitable microtonal guitar parts still hinted at but essentially smoothed over, just as the feedback is repressed except for a brief burst.(maybe available directly here?)
So who is the best band currently touring? Pasta-damned if I know, but the mighty Sonik Tooth are certainly in the running.
Update:
Also from the same issue of the Village Voice, albums guides for some jazz masters, sure to be on Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore's vinyl wall of shame (photo of which to be scanned later), such as
The Thelonious Monk Guide
He recorded the same songs over and over and never wore them out.
Can't go wrong really. I haven't heard a Monk album that was less than stellar, though apparently Monk's Blues is such an album. Personally, am ordering this TMonk Trio album to replace a vinyl copy played to stylus needle-wearout and beyond:
[1954, OJC]A trumped-up drug conviction and draconian cabaret laws would rob Monk of his ability to perform in New York for several years following the Blue Note sessions. Greater exposure through associations with Riverside and Columbia awaited. But Monk's transitional dates for Prestige showcase brilliant work and continue his progress with a steady stream of memorable tunes, including “Little Rootie Tootie,” “Reflections,” and the audaciously loose-limbed “Bemsha Swing.”
2. Sun Ra
Magic cities and other planes of there, all disguised as jazz
I need more Sun Ra in my life, I believe.
What a singular talent.
[1958, Evidence]The wondrous thing about Sun Ra was always that you could never tell who his space circus was going to offend. By making jazz seem strange he turned it into art at a time when most thought it was a fashion accessory. His cross-dressing avant-gardism could expose the real cool jazz guys as closet high modernists, yet at the same time appeal to moldy-fig fascists like Philip Larkin. But this is his one album that everyone agreed was real jazz. It introduced “Enlightenment,” the first of the Chicago-based Arkestra's “space marches,” during which the whole band of Space Egyptians paraded around the room singing. The deeply tinted ambient exercises like “Ancient Aeithopia” are here, exotica that lead back to Duke Ellington's “Pyramid” or “Menelik.” But lest you be too hip, Sun Ra would have the last word: “This is the sound of silhouettes, images and forecasts of tomorrow disguised as jazz.”
3. and the magnificent 'Trane
The John Coltrane Guide
From sideman to mesmerizer to evangelical to interstellar space
I already own nearly all of these, so I'll pull out this quote from one of my favorites:
A Love Supreme (Deluxe Edition)
[1964–65 (2002), Impulse]“Among the pious I am a scoffer: among the musical, I am religious” —George Bernard Shaw. Try thinking of the holy visitation in the grips of heroin withdrawal that Coltrane describes in the liner notes as a born-again experience, and this becomes his evangelical testimony. Coltrane's most celebrated work, and rightly so. (Along with dry runs, the in valuable bonus disk preserves Coltrane's only live performance of the work.)
Tags: Jazz, /music, /Sonic_Youth
