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Sonic Youth & American Music Club I-Beam,San Francisco,CA January 14th 1985 From the moment this New York quartet took the stage and launched into "Brave Men Run (In My Family)", the audience split into two camps - those who began devising escape routes and those who, sensing it was cowardly to escape, ran screaming into the sonic blare and came out relieved on the other side. Bassist Kim Gordon's whiney punky vocals keened over the white noise as the drums built and fell in strength and velocity,but the real torture was the guitars. Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore beat up their instruments, slamming screwdrivers and drumsticks through and on the hapless strings, twisting knobs to add dissonance, strumming feircly to create bulldozer waves of mutant rock and roll chords. For Sonic Youth IS a rock band,just as the Velvet Underground was in their day. Gordon's bass, while not playing with any subtlety, holds the band to a sort of structure, and the songs are all of reasonable length. I admit to enjoying the faster, louder (sic) numbers -"Kill Your Idols", the new single "Death Valley 69"- over the more extended excercises in guitar distortions,but criticising Sonic Youth excesses is difficult.The songs driven by panic,desperation, I've-been-to-the-edge-and-then-I-stood-and-looked-down, are intended to make you writhe, to drag you through those emotional states. To that end, Sonic Youth was successful-at least for those that stayed. Locals American Music Club opened,with a pleasurable set of, well, Americana-not unlike Dream Syndicate (but better than recent DS), Chris D or Springsteen. Their singer/guitarist has to be one of the more endearingly awkward frontpersons around-losing his pick, guitar strap, and mike in quick succession. A couple of strong pop melodies and a whiz guitarist make this band worth checking out. Review by Terri Sutton for BAM magazine April 5th 1985 |