Saturday October 9th
La Zona Rosa
$30 tickets
Could you imagine what alternative music would sound like if Sonic Youth never happened? Me neither.
Sonic Youth formed in 1981 in New York as part of the No Wave scene, and are responsible for bringing avant-garde indie rock from the shadows of the underground into the daylight. From the beginning, they have, and continue to, set the bar. The key influence for almost every band worth listening to.
It’s hard to believe that this band has been around for almost three decades because even newer album releases such as 2006’s Rather Ripped and last year’s The Eternal have so much tender, buoyant, and almost untouchable by anything youthful sweetness that feels precisely fresh among the most notable newbie band releases. Sonic Youth have a very signature sound that even when imitated often as it has been through the years can’t really be matched, continuously just above your head. As everyone else is still trying to parrallel themselves to the level of skill in the bands history, they continue to push what they created further and further into the future, providing tweaking and a fine tuning to their seasoned craft that can only come with experience and time. Not the first band to turn their amps up so close to death and call screaming fiery white noise feedback music, or to shove things like drumsticks between the frets of their guitars to change the timbre, but they definitely ran so far with it and molded it into such a beautiful art form that you would think that this was in fact, exactly the case.
Sonic Youth live is a hypnotic and engrossing tour de force. Their music contains layer upon layer of sound that at first may paint a picture of a mass of incoherent noise, but once everything syncs together in your head is unreal and beautiful to experience.There is such a dense resonance to every particle of every song, and an unmatchable sense of knock your socks off wonder that comes with figuring out how the different elements intermix to create explosions of gracefully melodic songs by watching it all happen organically right in front of your eyes. The best part is when all the guitars are going the same time, oh my.
Sonic Youth makes it too easy to be perpetually fascinated with their ever-evolving and at the same time solidly established authentic and amazing sound. They continue to carry forward the best of everything they brought out from the very beginning as it continues to get more exceptional with time.
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