The Empty Page - Sonic Youth

The Empty Page - Sonic Youth



Monday morning on the bus. My face feels really dry despite the after shave. Mouth kind of tastes like cold coffee. The newsprint smell coming off my newspaper is already giving me a headache. Something or another ends and my iPod rings up "Total Trash" by Sonic Youth.

Needless to say, I had a very productive day on Monday.

I graded lots of paper while listening to the strange assortment of SY on my iPod (Daydream Nation, Rather Ripped, Goo, and Murray Street). I listened to "Total Trash" a few more times, astonished as always that such a thing was actually composed by human beings. I mean, Thurston Moore is a man with a memory like mine. But whereas I forget my own fucking birthday, he can remember who has to claim the feedback squeal in "Candle." The simple factness of SY astonishes me.

Also, I had/have/will have a huge crush on Kim Gordon.

Anyway, I listened to Murray Street for the first time in years. I was astonished (again) at the first song, "The Empty Page." I didn't remember this song at all. I guess I only think of Murray Street as the one with "Sympathy for the Strawberry" and "Rain on Tin" on it. But "The Empty Page" defies normal SY distinctions. Think about those opening chords. They're clean, distinguishable. They seem to bear some resemblance to standard tuning. There's even an irristable hook embedded in there.

Look, the thing that makes Sonic Youth the force that they have become is their ability to both melt and solidify silly things like melody, chord progressions, and time signatures. They belong to one of the most elite clubs around: Bands Who Don't Produce Derivative Copycats. No one else sounds like SY because it's impossible to sound like them without actually, you know, having Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Renaldo in your band. There are very few bands who can claim this status. But "The Empty Page" is surprising only because of its utter lack of surprises. Sure there is that awesome guitar battle between Moore and Renaldo in the middle of the song. But it's more gorgeous and uplifting than actually abrasive. For fuck's sake, they played the song on Carson Daley's show! The rest of the song foregrounds a kind of nostalgia that bubbles up sometimes in their work. Those opening lines are pretty telling: "These are the words/But not the truth/God bless them all when they speak to you." The song is a weird homage to attempts, to effort, to potential. After all, isn't that white a blank page symbolizes more than anything else?

Andrew Bird and the Triumphant Trio

Anonanimal

Noble Beast, 2009.

My favorite music argument in college was bands with three straight great albums. Let me save you some time by saying it's not a very long list. Recent entrants to my mind include Radiohead (duh), Death Cab (maybe?-- Photo Album, Transatlanticism, Plans, Narrow Stairs are all pretty awesome), Cat Power... anyway, I am as sure about Andrew Bird as I am about Radiohead. Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs, Armchair Apocrypha, and Noble Beast are all drop-dead records.

As I said in my review of Noble Beast when it came out, it's weird hearing some other influences creep into Bird's records, because no one else sounds like him. At all, really. He's something unto himself, and that shit doesn't happen at all these days.

He has an enviable vocabulary, and writes lyrics that couldn't work for anyone else, like the opening lines of "Effigy," "If you come to find me affable/ Build an replica for me/ Would the idea to you be laughable/ Of a pale facsimile/ If you come to burn an effigy/ It should keep the flies away."

How he smooshes all these sounds together and mixes them with weird lyrics is beyond me. It just works.

"Anonanimal" has just been making the rounds in my head lately, and so I present it here. As is often the case with Bird, he's in no hurry to get to the meat of the song. The opening lasts a good couple of minutes, but they don't feel boring, with the plucking of strings, the electric guitar jumping in, and then some gentle strings. Bird himself begins muttering some things that I don't understand, about viciousness and transformations.

But when the song begins in earnest, with handclaps and stomps and Bird imploring, "Hold on just a second/ hold on just a second/ I know this one/ I know this song," and then explodes into a more regulated guitar line, drums, and, uh, more handclaps, the world feels like it opens wide, a panoramic view.

Bird's facility with tunes and melodies gives him the power to often use two or three in one song, and his songs often feel more like movements because of it. I often hear the opening of a song and can't remember which one it is right away because it so thoroughly becomes something else as it goes on. He's one of the best artists of the decade for certain, one of the most consistent, and one of the most adventurous.