Sonic Youth, El-P, and growing with an artist

No. 1307: Sonic Youth - Evol

Sometimes you need to get reacquainted with music you already love. When I was younger, my priority was always new music. Whatever was next was the thing that drew my attention and what excited me. To an extent, that’s still true (this year’s seen some pretty great stuff show up in my inbox!) but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to appreciate the idea of growing with an artist, or hearing familiar music in a new way. Or put another way, that your relationship with music is always evolving. I always find it odd when someone only listens to just one or two artists and leaves it at that, mainly because I think I’d get bored pretty fast? But that long-term-listener relationship with a band is one that has more value to me as someone old enough for that to not be an exaggeration. 

Sonic Youth has been one of my favorite bands since I was in high school and heard Goo for the first time. I’ve seen them three times—the Del Mar Racetrack in 2002, All Tomorrow’s Parties 2003, and the House of Blues San Diego in 2005. All of them great. (And they played “Eric’s Trip” at two of them, I’m pretty sure, which is one of my favorite songs of theirs—big fan of Lee songs.) And at one point I probably thought that I’d heard all I needed to hear from Sonic Youth. 

It’s a funny thing, though: Music you love and that you continually return to doesn’t always sound the same way twice. You hear things you didn’t notice before. You make connections that you didn’t realize were there. Not everyone listens to music like that; some prefer the comfort of knowing something is exactly the way they remembered it, and a lot of the time it’s that way for me. But Sonic Youth isn’t one of those bands by design, really. And Evol is one of those albums that is never quite like I remember it. In fact, it’s always better. 

They have a lot of albums, but this one still climbs toward the top, just below Daydream Nation and Sister, just a little above Bad Moon Rising, maybe just about even with Goo and Dirty? It’s so hard to quantify, but this is where the experiments began to congeal into really fucking great songs, where their fascination with America’s dark side began to merge with its facade of glamour. There’s at least one genuine anthem (“Star Power”), one epic, always-different-live song that became a staple of their performances (“Expressway to Yr Skull”), and weird curiosities like “In the Kingdom #19,” which I’m obligated to call one of my favorites, as a longtime proponent of the Lee Ranaldo-fronted songs on SY albums (see also: “Eric’s Trip,” “Pipeline/Kill Time”). 

To put it simply, this is the album where Sonic Youth really start to become the band that they were at their peak (but then again, when were they ever not? Even their “bad” albums are way more interesting than much more conservative bands’ best). And I’m sure the next time I hear it, it’ll be just a little bit different than I remember it. Rating: 9.5

Listen: “Star Power”

No. 1308: Baden Powell - Tristeza On Guitar

I write about this a lot, but it bears repeating that listening to and discovering new music was a big source of relief and a kind of therapy for me early on in the pandemic. I couldn’t go anywhere or socialize with people, but I could find a source of refuge in music. And every day I made a point of listening to records I’d never heard before. (By “records” here, I’m talking about streaming, not necessarily a huge stack of records in my house I’d never listened to, just to clarify.) 

One of them was this instrumental record by Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell, which is phenomenal. Most of it is samba in the vein of Jorge Ben or bossa nova a la Jobim, with an emphasis on guitar, though there’s some interesting tracks, like a couple of moments of solo classical guitar that sort of makes me feel like I walked in a Barnes & Noble in the ‘90s, or a cover of Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight,” which is one of those songs I love no matter who plays it. 

Two years later I bought a copy on vinyl (it was reissued by a German label in 2017 and I guess they had a fresh pressing or something? Not too clued in on the circumstances to be honest), which may or may not have kicked off a rash of buying other Brazilian records. Stay tuned. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Canto de Ossanha”

No. 1309: El-P - Fantastic Damage

There are a lot of scenes, movements, and musical eras for which I can’t make any reasonable claim for being on the ground floor. Sometimes it’s for the best (see: chillwave, a genre I thought sucked then and still think is terrible, except for Toro y Moi). But sometimes playing catch-up shows me how much I’ve been missing out. That’s more or less what happened in the early 2000s with the Rawkus-to-Def Jux (and sometimes Anticon) underground rap wave. I had no idea who Company Flow were in 1997, and my rap knowledge in high school was mostly relegated to what my friends were listening to or what was getting good reviews in CMJ or whatever—The Roots, Wu-Tang Clan, and so on. 

That said, once I started college the depth of my listening grew exponentially for a variety of reasons: access to promos from starting a career as a student journalist, four years as a DJ on my school’s radio station, and oh yeah, file sharing! Lots of file sharing. I never viewed it as a substitute for buying CDs (and, subsequently, records) but rather a test drive. Now we have streaming, which is a similar principle, though again, I’m probably in the minority by saying “now I know I like a thing, I’m going to buy a thing.” But I also want that thing to continue to exist. Like restaurants I enjoy or government services I’d like to continue to be funded by my taxes. (I realize the pick-and-choose aspect of media consumption doesn’t apply here, but still…)

I can probably thank MF Doom/Madvillain for getting me to start moving back through the indie rap explosion of the early ‘00s, and quickly realized I’d been sleeping on, oh, everything El-P produced. Like Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, which I don’t own because I haven’t been willing to pull the trigger on the $100 deluxe edition (which is the only version that’s readily available — maybe one day I’ll say “fuck it” but I’m not sure I need the instrumentals as a separate set of records, even if production wise it’s masterpiece-level production from El-P). 

But after that record, El released his solo debut Fantastic Damage, following the end of Company Flow. He’s only released three solo records, so it’s a small sample size to begin with, but Fantastic Damage remains my favorite. For one, it slaps. The bassline in “Constellation Funk” is just two notes, but goddamn it’s just a beast of a track. For another, it’s about as amazing an origin story of an album as you’re likely to hear in any genre, though hip-hop has a lot of them (and I’m not necessarily saying this is a qualitatively better album than, say, good kid, m.A.A.d. city, but man, it’s close). “Squeegee Man Shooting” sets the stage with narratives from the ‘80s, young El playing Nintendo and falling in love with hip-hop, with the grime of the Mayor Koch era as the backdrop, complete with the title incident: an unhoused person offering window cleanings being shot and killed by the cops. 

Fantastic Damage also has two fantastic singles, “Deep Space 9mm” and “Stepfather Factory.” The former is a dystopian reflection on how terrifying it is that there are guns everywhere in America, set to some of his most eerie but catchy production, while the latter is a satirical sci-fi-ification of his own experience growing up with an abusive stepfather. It’s clever and masterfully crafted, but read between the lines and it’s fucking devastating. 

I caught El-P at SXSW in 2008, after his second album I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead came out, and it was a super weird showcase. Del the Funkee Homosapien performed, high out of his mind, but still pretty dope, including an Albarn-free performance of “Clint Eastwood.” Devin the Dude also performed and I don’t remember much about it except for thinking I didn’t really like his set that much. Bushwick Bill showed up between sets to do a kind of hypeman thing? I guess? This is starting to feel like a fever dream. Anyway, El-P performed last as I recall and said more or less what Trent Reznor does in the meme we’ve all seen: “Who wants to hear some happy songs? Because we don’t have any.” Which is fitting; that most recent album of his featured a Reznor collab. (El-P’s DJ also wore a t-shirt that said “MAN I love kittens”). I was pretty tired and not looking forward to the long back to my hotel, but he performed “Deep Space 9mm” and that was enough for me to call it a highlight. And when Fat Possum finally reissued this masterpiece of an album, I pretty much had my finger on the pre-order button before I finished reading the announcement. Rating: 9.4

Listen: “Deep Space 9mm”

No. 1310: Broadcast & the Focus Group - Play Witch Cults of the Radio Age

Back in 2022, Warp did Broadcast fans a solid by reissuing a handful of the group’s rare EPs and a set of BBC live recordings. And one of them you’ll find below. Weirdly I thought I had pretty much all the Broadcast material that was released at that point while stupidly overlooking this gem of a psychedelic sound collage record. That’s on me. 

It’s a cool record, but definitely a little different than their other studio records, essentially a continuous sequence of ever-shifting sonic hallucinations, made in collaboration with the Focus Group, aka Julian House, the artist who designed all their album covers. There are actual songs here, like opener “The Be Colony” and the eerie “Make My Sleep His Song,” but it’s very much a trip down the rabbit hole or looking glass or whatever Lewis Carroll experience you prefer. Trippy stuff. But as with any Broadcast album, immersive and immaculately crafted. 

I bought this along with Mother Is the Milky Way at Vinyl Conflict in Richmond, which is a great record store that I’ve pretty much never left without finding something cool. It’s primarily punk and metal, but they carry a little bit of everything and the owner, Bobby, is a Broadcast fan (I specifically remember him mentioning that these were awesome records when I bought them—and I implicitly trust anyone who loves Broadcast with my life. Well… maybe not that far, but still.) Rating: 9.0

Listen: “The Be Colony”

No. 1311: Broadcast - Mother is the Milky Way

And here we have another Broadcast release! The same year that Broadcast released Witch Cults, they put out a tour-only (I think?) EP that had a similar kind of sound-collage aesthetic, short tracks bleeding into one another. For anyone who got into the band through songs like “Come On Let’s Go,” it’s probably a pretty disorienting experience. Actually, for anyone it’s a disorienting experience, that’s sort of the point. Though there are a few actual pop songs (so to speak) on the album, like “In Here the World Begins.” There’s a lot of flute, weird dialogue samples, plus it’s often pretty distorted or lo-fi. But Warp ultimately reissued the EP along with a BBC sessions EP and the group’s similarly experimental, instrumental Microtonics recordings. I had a mixture of excitement and sadness when I picked this up (and the Witch Cults album) because it was the last Broadcast music I knew I’d buy. …Until a couple years later when that all changed. (!) Rating: 8.5

Listen: “In Here the World Begins”

No. 1312: The Replacements - Pleased to Meet Me

I bought this in the same batch as the two Broadcast albums and the Pig Destroyer record, and at the time it just seemed like a good find. An inexpensive copy of a killer record by a great band. What more justification do I need, really?

But I got into the Replacements (again!) in a big way about a year later. It’s fitting that this is in the same batch with Sonic Youth’s Evol, since both are bands that I already liked—and have for a long, long time! We’re talking decades here—but this sort of began a renewed infatuation with their music, in a manner of speaking. I’m not sure I can pinpoint the moment that The Replacements started to appeal to me, but it probably had something to do with seeing the video for “Bastards of Young,” with the dude kicking the speaker in. That ruled. 

Pleased to Meet Me is a significant dividing line between the band’s rowdier early records and the major label polish that turned a lot of listeners off. Don’t Tell a Soul, which came out two years later, is their most divisive record, probably with good reason, but definitely not their worst. (That for me is All Shook Down, which has good songs but just kind of feels unfinished? Half of it sounds like Paul Westerberg solo demos—it’s less an album than a compilation of parts that don’t necessarily belong together.) But this one is, I won’t say beloved by all, but everyone seems to dig it. One friend and colleague pretty emphatically categorizes it as their best, and while I disagree, it’s not wrong, necessarily. Really, how could you not be a fan, with songs like “Alex Chilton,” and “Skyway” and “I.O.U” and “Nightclub Jitters” and, one of my favorites, “I Don’t Know,” which is maybe a pisstake but it has some great saxophone and kind of recaptures that early snotty Mats sensibility. I mean, what’s not to like?

That Bob Stinson isn’t on the album sets it apart from the previous records, and it’s hard not to miss his more raucous guitar attack, but that said, while it’s a transitional period for the group here, they pull it off well. But I think the thing I didn’t realize is that this album was already in my blood when I bought this copy; every time I hear “Can’t Hardly Wait,” I can’t help but try to sing along—in a register I can’t really pull off!—at the top of my lungs: “I’ll write you a letter TOMORROW! Tonight I can’t hold a pen.” What a great fucking band. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Can’t Hardly Wait”

No. 1313: Pig Destroyer - Phantom Limb

I’m not sure what subgenre of metal it took me the longest to get into. The real answer is probably prog-metal or something (but as a rule any metal that sounds like Deep Purple is absolutely cool with me, just add organ—I see you Opeth and Bedsore). But grindcore was something that took me a while to get into. It’s weird to think that this Pig Destroyer record is 18 years old, but this album was pretty big in making me a grindcore dude™. Then again, Pig Destroyer are just Very Good At Grindcore. There’s more groove, more gnarly death metal riffs, more hardcore urgency. It’s all pretty rockin’. While grindcore is typically an exercise in chaos, Pig Destroyer add more to that equation, fleshing out their songs into pieces that feel complete and cohesive despite being still pretty short. But then you have songs like “Alexandria” and “The Machete Twins,” which despite being kind of terrifying still just righteously kick ass. Which is ultimately what I want in a metal record. Songs that kick ass. Don’t we all? 

(Note: Awesome John Baizley cover art too, which pairs well with last entry’s Kylesa record.) Rating: 9.1

Listen: “The Machete Twins”

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Bonus LOLs: In 2021 I said I’d be caught up on this blog within a year. Nope!