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Originally Posted by E. Noisefield
I totally get what you guys are saying. They changed quite dramatically in the '90s. The change may not have been altogether pleasant for fans of the spacey, unsettling, unhinged sound of their early stuff. I myself have even thought, at times, that '90s SY *just isn't SY*. It's a completely different beast.
To make sense of all of these changes, I started thinking about SY differently. I started thinking of them based on the standards of classic "pop". I started equating them, in my head, to bands like the Beatles. I know they're absolutely nothing alike, but if you view their '90s output as just once facet of the whole, then it just makes them seem all the more dynamic and eclectic. Even the Beatles had "shitty" records ("shitty" for the Beatles still being far better than average) like Magical Mystery Tour, where they just got lost for a bit in the sensation they'd created. Imagine Dirty as SY's MMT.
Then '00s SY is another matter altogether. They became something different all over again. So we've got the post-hardcore art-noise SY, the alterna-grunge SY, and the "godfathers of indie" SY who just jammed and had fun like the grateful dead.
Having all of these archetypes in one is like having the leather-coat, Liverpool pub Beatles, the perfect-pop band Beatles, the psychedelic Beatles, and the frustrated, angsty,"grown-up" Beatles shown on the White Album and Let it Be and Abbey road. I know comparing the two is a stretch, but SY is so BIG for me that I can literally think of them as three (maybe four if you count the SYR SY) bands in one, and that is an exciting thought! It helps me appreciate even their worst moments. Besides, like I said, Goo is a perfect transition from DDN into more mainstream alternative.
Personally I think "Sister" is their best album, and I'm definitely more inclined to think of their'80s output when considering my favorite albums ever. But there is gold all over their catalog. I honestly, when I think hard about it, can't tell you which SY is my favorite! The '80s, obviously the best track record. But the '90s yielded ATL, which is one of my favorite albums ever made, and the '00s had Murray Street and SN and RR and tons of incredible SYR material. So I don't even know which "version" of the band I like best, but that's ok with me.
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You make some great points there, even if I don't necessarily agree with the core comparison which, to be fair you also acknowledge as being a bit of a 'stretch'. I don't want to come across as dismissing SY's post 80s output. Some of it I think is excellent. It just doesn't capture my imagination the way LPs like CiS, BMR, etc, did and, to an extent, still do. I think Murmer got it spot on when describing a certain nightmarish quality to those records. There's a strange bum trip campfire quality to songs like Halloween, Shaking Hell, Brother James, etc, which I think they pretty much abandoned quite early on. I can see
why they moved on from that and in many ways respect them even more for doing so but I still think of those songs as the reason why I got into them in the first place and sort of became increasingly distant from them as a band the further they moved on from that template. But that's my problem, ultimately, not theirs.