Four Decades Of Sonic Youth’s Evol
Cover Girl - Lung Leg (Richard Kern - “Submit to Me”)
We’ve been on a steady roll covering these major milestones in Sonic Youth’s deranged discography over the past couple of years. With some of their greatest efforts celebrating their 30th and 40th anniversaries, it goes without saying how iconic, influential, and irresistibly intense the band’s liberating lore has become since forming in 1981, and we’re here for every meditative minute of it. Like being in tune with the barometric system as big, bold bolts of lightning crack across the sky like elemental explosions from God’s thunderous thumb, Sonic Youth’s 1986 masterpiece “Evol” is an endlessly expressive effort that, with each new listen, truly transcends space and time just as their most cherished contemporaries had done in their poetic prime. There’s really no reason to bring up or discuss previous releases, singles, EPs, or bootlegs to establish some base conversation to build from because this particular material perfectly punctures into the tender, yet tough meat of a still-beating heart like a sacred spear rusted from the stinky salt still clinging on like a desperate attempt at salvation. While salivating on the steering wheel, wide-eyed and drooling, the radio screams in the static wind as you white-knuckle it down Interstate 278 (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway/Gowanus Expressway) going about a hundred and ten; the album opens with the cosmic classic “Tom Violence,” before parallel parking into the soothing sedation of Gordon’s “Shadow Of A Doubt.” After slowing down from extensive touring in support of their 1985 classic “Bad Moon Rising,” and a lineup change following the departure of Bob Bert, whom Steve Shelley quickly replaced, the band wasted no time working on fresh material for their third album.
Photo: Ebet Roberts
Eventually setting up camp with legendary producer Martin Bisi, whose work can be heard throughout the hexagonal hallways of John Zorn, Swans, Boredoms, and Herbie Hancock, to name a few, at BC Studio, initially named OAO, Operation All Out, Studio, in a sophisticated section of Brooklyn with Bill Laswell and Brian Eno, where they had captured most of the No Wave and early hip-hop days, the band was in a fascinating place in an even more fascinating time. The landscape of music, culture, politics, and everything in between was changing rapidly, and so was the group’s sound and magical mechanisms. Signing with legendary Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s label SST, the band entered this full-circle moment as they shared a familiar space with the likes of their contemporaries and peers Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets, and several others, before adding a transcendental tone to the punk/hardcore heritage they grew up in. Like a piece of wood splintering from the iconic impact of a legendary bolt of lightning, “Evol” takes place in the spring of 1986 in Brooklyn, the same year and month that Microsoft went public, and the ISP’s (International Space Probes) Soviet Vega 1 and Vega 2, the European Space Agency's Giotto, as well as Japan's Suisei and Sakigake, all completed historic flybys of Halley’s Comet; the band carefully captured perhaps their most dynamically rich body of work at this particular point in their career.
The album contains this creatively charged and sexually stimulating collection of songs that course through the listener’s vibrant veins like a blast of dystopian drug abuse, while simultaneously blacking out the world around you as the speed from the substance courses through the cosmic channels deep under your skin. Featuring tracks such as the exceptionally ecstatic “Expressway To Yr Skull,” the album’s first and only single, “Star Power,” and, of course, the epic opener, “Tom Violence,” that we mentioned earlier, the record also features classic characters like Lydia Lunch and Mike Watt, who was coming off the untimely death of bandmate D. Boone. So what could we possibly unlock from this already critically celebrated piece of harmonious history, years later? Probably nothing, if I’m perfectly honest, but one thing is for certain: you can hit play at any point in the day, week, month, or year, and enjoy the blissful teleportation into the cold, calculated channel of concentrated creativity from one of the greatest bands of all time.
