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SoundsXP Presents

Pictures from some recent gigs we've hosted:

29 March 2013 - Brixton, London

Viv Albertine, VuVuVultures, Left Leg, Mickey Gloss, Big Wave, No Cars, Arthur Gunn, Simon Love (Pictures)

8 March 2013 - Lexington, London

R.Ring, Golden Grrrls, Slushy Guts and Equinox (Pictures)

On Our iPod

Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold (album)

Antony Harding - Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear (album)

Black Angels - Indigo Meadow (album)

Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin (album)

Still Corners - Strange Pleasures (album)

Savages - Silence Yourself (album)

Mikal Cronin - MC II (album)

Can’s Ege Bamyasi played by Stephen Malkmus and Friends(album)

Victoria and Jacob - Festival 7"

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City (album)

Sauna Youth - False Jesii Part II 7”

Lightning Bolt - Oblivion Hunter

Robyn Hitchcock - There Goes The Ice (2x 12")

Latest Forum Posts

Album Review

Sonic Youth
Smart Bar, Chicago, 1985 Goofin’

Article written by Michael H - Nov 24, 2012

The rattle of chains. A distant rumble of approaching thunder. The squealing of train breaks. Chundering vomitous tape murk. A voice: "I don't really know much about it." Creeping hesitant thumping. This album doesn't so much begin, as coalesce from the air; set opener 'Halloween' materializing from a fog of echo and distortion. It's slowly massing noise-clouds and disconcertingly erotic vocal drawls coming together into one of Sonic Youth's most thick concoctions.

Always a band to flay your ears off to, this live album from 1985 catches them at a particularly explosive period. Beginning their movement through one of the best album sequences by any band ever: Bad Moon Rising, Evol, Sister, Daydream Nation. 'Smart Bar, Chicago, 1985' is a live recording on the border of the Bad Moon Rising / Evol transition from the No Wave nerve plucking of 'Confusion is Sex/Kill Yr Idols' to their patented boiling white hot twin guitar disharmonics they would make their own over the next decade.

For fans of SY at their most noisy, this album contains a number of skull crackers, a raging tear up of 'Death Valley 69'; the taut and slowly collapsing six-string torturing on 'I Love Her All The Time'; the walls-are-closing-in panic of 'Ghost Bitch'; the flash burnt psychedlia of 'Brave Men Run (In My Family)'.

Absolutely essential for all Sonic Youth fans, 'Smart Bar', as well as being a fascinating historical document, shows the band at their most hedonistic and dangerous. They're so enticingly destructive that it’s like being seduced by a blender. Like a J G Ballard protagonist you walk towards the peril, despite, or because of, the whirling teeth and crashing noise.

Links:
http://www.sonicyouth.com/