jlazerus

Not a genre I’m particularly fond of, but it didn’t make me cringe AS MUCH as some modern pop (still wondering how Lana del Ray escaped containment). Interesting artist story. But if you remove his story from the music itself, not great. Nothing novel or that much different from a lot of other post-Michael Jackson pop music. Interesting androgynous voice.

Electronic music is a lot more enjoyable when it's not trying to be a proxy for any other kind of traditional sound making - i.e., guitar, bass, drums, horns, strings, etc. Aphex Twin isn't trying to mask the electronic nature of what he's doing, rather, he celebrates it. He toys with it, playing.

Aphex plays with the music as a cat would: batting around and pouncing, only to casually retreat and relax, but returning again and again from different angles, different postures, different positions. Partly for fun, partly to exercise its essential nature. Paradoxically unpredictable yet patterned, regular, rhythmic.

When music becomes too perfected by the technology and tools used to make it, all the humanity, art, and soul is squeezed out. Electronic music is especially susceptible to this problem. The sense of play is gone. Rather, it become a prescribed idea of what music "should" be, what you'll buy, a way to eliminate all risk artistically and economically. (Essentially everything that sucks about the world today.)

SO, it's incredibly rare when someone avoids the trap of electronica - its tendency to be a soulless proxy for human-centered art - and creates something unique and interesting, that takes risks, and stays true to its nature.

This album has everything you could possibly want from a 70's hard rock band: drum solos, guitar solos, vocal gymnastics by the one and only Ian Gillan, organ from outer space, noisy ending, amusing patter, Ian Paice... what more do you want. Best live album ever?

And people complain that there's too many Elvis Costello albums. Might go on Reddit and have somebody help me understand the appeal. Please for the love of all that’s good, stop calling Sonic Youth punk.

The same as all their other stuff except slightly younger. Edgelords.

The most accessible Sonic Youth album, still pretentious and disrespectful of the audience.

Like in the punk days you'd go visit friends, they'd have a band (16 - 18 year olds) in the basement and they would be messing around with instruments they were just learning to play, just making obnoxious noise for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that. But no one is taking it seriously.

THe first half of the album is ok. The second is unlistenable garbage that sounds like all of the rest of Sonic Youth's unlistenable garbage.