See, where you hear "cut the fat", I hear "lose individuality". The guitar is an instrument with a lot of subtle harmonics and acoustics, much of which is loss when sound engineers flatten out all of the instruments in a track so that the distortion doesn't blow out their precious microphones.
Never could get into Silversun Pickups. They sound like Cave In, turning up their amps but not without any kind of force behind it.
You could have stopped at noisy. It borders on white noise, until they fall into pits of masturbatory riffing. I'm told that this is the sign of true emotional artistry, while I ask myself why I'm bothering to pollute my ears with these auditory cum buckets.
The white noise complaint always felt like the mark of someone with an unrefined ear, as though a band which tries to achieve an aggressive tonality to their guitar playing while deliberately avoiding pop traps is something to frown upon. Their arrangements can be chaotic, dipping out at the last moment from what your ear wants to hear. It's challenging, engaging music but it takes more than a passive listen to really appreciate. It's not a pop, single band that you appreciate because of a hook in one song.
Daydream Nation is their most accessible album by far, creating an almost nightmarish world born out of the end of the Reagan era that it came from. It ultimately doesn't go for the nihilist kitsch that Trent Reznor would make BILLIONS OF DOLLARS on, but forces the brain to kickstart itself into thinking.
As for what came from then, it's a little bit harder to pinpoint. Noise rock, shoegaze, industrial, even grunge owes a huge debt to the path Sonic Youth paved, but the real progeny lies in the often neglected math rock. Bands like Fugazi, the New Year, June of '44, Chavez and Silkworm delve into the promises Sonic Youth was making.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uxjzMyhT8Ehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZzFvONbIshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsToqOEZnxQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKr45j6S_qQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdUJioYWcqgLove getting a chance to really spar over music. I've been feeling indignant because my co-workers insist on playing either death metal or Andrew Lloyd Weber rock all day, and those just feel like intellectual dead ends.
I feel as if what I'm seeing is merely a debate between a person who goes to concerts and a person who listens to recordings.
Am I correct in feeling this?
Not at all. I'm trying to avoid turning this into a "my band is better than your band" cock-showing contest, I just love me some Sonic Youth and take it as an opportunity to offer up some of my other favorite bands as well.
