[Moshe]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/...166491775.html

Seventeen albums and 25 years later, Sonic Youth are still peerless, writes Anthony Carew.
ON THE telephone to EG, on the eve of returning to Australia with Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon has just seen the video clip for Incinerate, the pseudo-single from the New York noiseniks' 17th album, Rather Ripped. Layering live footage into a blur of colour and light, the clip, made by French filmmaker Claire Denis, is no mere marketing gimmick. What's the person some consider the world's greatest female director doing shooting a rock video?
"We've known Claire for a long time, and she's been wanting to do something with us for years, but she's always working on something," Gordon says. While Gordon admits she hasn't seen all Denis' work, her favourite is Beau Travail. And there is a Denis film you won't get her to see: Trouble Every Day, her vampiric-cannibalism tour-de-force starring longtime collaborator Vincent Gallo. "There's no way I could bring myself to watch that," Gordon says. "I'm afraid to see it. I think it's because I know Vince, so I really feel like I don't need to see him." Eating people? "Oh," Gordon winces, "definitely not."
The 53-year-old guitarist-bassist-vocalist is keen to bring the band back to the stage while riding the momentum of Rather Ripped. It finds Sonic Youth in their most straightforward form since the early '90s, the band's abstract, detuned avant-rock hammered into song-like shape. Gordon wanted to call the album Rocked Up, with Rather Ripped the title favoured by her husband and Sonic Youth co-founder Thurston Moore.
Gordon can't go much further than those two words in describing the disc. She struggles when asked what the album may be about. "I don't know, to be honest," she confesses. "It may not be about anything. Music is, in some senses, too visceral to really be about anything. It's a strange kind of object, music. When we're making an album, it's all very intuitive, and we rarely talk about it. We're not really conceptual about our records. We're not like Madonna: this one's going to be about religion, this one's going to be about my body.
"Usually, you don't know what an album is about until 10 years later. I was listening to this interview with Lou Reed, and people asked him what he meant about some lyric, and he said that sometimes you don't know what something's about until 10 or 15 years later."
So what is (1995's) Washing Machine about? "I don't know," Gordon laughs. "Ask me in five years."

Unlike most of the contemporary music world, you can almost guarantee that Sonic Youth will still be around in five years, celebrating their 30th anniversary. Kept alive by their obsession with popular culture, the quartet, which has been, for the past 20 years, Gordon, Moore, guitarist Lee Ranaldo, and drummer Steve Shelley, have few peers. Yo La Tengo are there in terms of longevity but Gordon sees only one long-running outfit to which they feel an artistic affinity: "The Boredoms," she says. "Um, that's all that I can think of."
Yamatsuka Eye's Japanoise institution was, thus, a prized addition to the All Tomorrow's Parties Music Festival that Sonic Youth curated for the first time in 2002; alongside acts ranging from Aphex Twin to Eddie Vedder, Peaches and Big Star.
Sonic Youth's festival was deemed such a success that they curated another in 2004, and Moore will preside over the fest's "Nightmare Before Christmas" this December. The band have increasingly focused on playing festivals over the years, their trip here built around an appearance at Splendour in the Grass.
"I really like (playing festivals)," Gordon says. "It's great playing to such a huge mass of people. You just have to tailor your material to a big crowd. If we're playing a festival, we make sure we bring our good-time noise set."
Sonic Youth play the Palace on Monday. Rather Ripped is out through Universal.

[Asim]

Haha, Gordon made fun of Yo La Tengo ? Am I interpreting that right ? They are really boring, and they ripped Branca's (/Sonic Youth) guitar. Just listen to Big Day Coming, Kaplan stole Thurston's voice. Cherry Chapstick, although a good song, just sounds like an upbeat Sonic Youth song. ICHtHBaO is really great but otherwise, they are really boring. Some of Nurse sounds like YLT's Inside Out-era, though.

[doctor dan]

nah theres no yo la tengo bashing there, im pretty sure theres no haterd towards that band fro the sy front. i quite like there sound, but im no huge fan. even so, summer sun is one of the best relaxing albums of recent times, finding really interesting textures. add to that the obvious quality of the 'sugarcube' video...

[Asim]

Yeah, I figured that out later. Bummer