AWmusic

Sonic Youth is one of the few bands I have consistently enjoyed for many years, and frankly, though they have been covered to hell and back, I always welcome another group eager to represent its old material in new forms . . . albeit with slight suspicion. For example, I didn’t mind Ruby Isle’s rather campy cover of “Teenage Riot,” though I found the singer’s voice as annoying as Kevin Barnes‘, while not nearly as proficient or interesting. Their replacement of guitars with synths was an intuitive contemporary choice, but not executed the best way, in my opinion. (They eschewed the drone-effect which is peculiar, crucial to the song.)

Belgian band Wixel (who list “acousmatic” and “shoegaze” as genre labels) have redesigned seven classic Sonic Youth tracks in ambient style. Those of us used to Thurston Moore‘s cool vocal delivery or Kim Gordon‘s strained effects on the microphone, not to mention Lee Ranaldo‘s tearing guitar, should probably brew ourselves some opium tea and prepare to ingest these low-impact versions another way.

I am glad, first of all, for the simplicity of these re-arrangements. Wixel recaptures noise through synthesized instruments, and the band is careful never to overwhelm (even if that happens to be the wish of the original song). The huge whammy guitars of “Expressway to Yr Skull” are replaced with atmospheric piano, glockenspiel, and synths rather reminiscent of Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s collaborations. The noisy “Teenage Riot” finds itself sliced to half its length, and rendered barely recognizable. (Listen for yourself below.) We also discover on the album a song called “Little Trouble Girl,” a beautiful number off of SY’s 1995 Washing Machine, which featured The Pixies’ and Breeders’ Kim Deal on vocals, which Wixel redoes with acoustic guitars, sans vocals of course.

What happens on this album, I suppose, is the transformation of Sonic Youth songs into sounds the band would never use, their transformation into otherwise than Sonic Youth songs, in short. It may be a testament to Wixel’s ingenuity that the immediately recognizable melody of “Schizophrenia” is deferred until three-and-a-half minutes in the cover version, but the absent lyrical content, while it may be ignorable or even apt in other Sonic Youth covers, is something I genuinely miss on this version. “Shadow Of A Doubt” (from their 1986 album EVOL, and one of my favourite SY tracks) is the only one on the album which makes a point of retaining the original character of the song. No accordions or xylophones here; instead, Wixel employs a swashbuckling distorted guitar, which replicates some of its noisier elements.

Out of the wilderness of 1980s independent music in America, long before Myspace and web networking, when isolated local scenes were still loosely connected by touring bands and fanzines, fame was elusive; and yet by 1991, “the year punk broke,” Sonic Youth had established itself as the godfather band of punk/indie. The group deserves its accolades and remembrances by others, and this re-designed collection of some classic material is not at all a bad salute by Wixel. I’d give it a 7.3 out of 10.

Wixel-Expressway To Yr Skull
Wixel-Teenage Riot
Wixel-Scizophrenia