Sonic Youth Confusion Is Sex Vinyl LP 2022
Tracklist:
1. (She’s In A) Bad Mood
2. Protect Me You
3. Freezer Burn I Wanna Be Your Dog
4. Shaking Hell
5. Inhuman
6. The World Looks Red
7. Confusion Is Next
8. Making The Nature Scene
9. Lee Is Free
Sonic Youth’s Confusion is sex. Includes live cover of The Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog. Vinyl includes digital download.
Originally slated to be a 7 to follow up their self titled debut, Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex blossomed into the band’s first album, a brain bludgeoning, completely fried endeavor of dissonance and disarray, a perfect soundtrack for running from a chain wielding gang near the SIN Club.
This was the sound of 1983 New York City, nothing like the jangly roots of college radio rock starting to formulate in Athens, Georgia. It sounded like no one else on Earth, for that matter. The raw, Wharton Tiers 8 track production is dark, the Kim Gordon scrawled cover figure art of Thurston Moore is dark, Lee Ranaldo’s back cover photo collage and Catherine Ceresole’s crumpled xeroxed images that adorned the inside are dark. It’s an album that moves Sonic Youth forward from their first EP almost by devolving backwards into true ugly, lo fi primitivity.
The bare boned arsenal of jun kpile guitars and implementation of alternate tunings was growing, and so were the songs that matched the individual attributes of each instrument, certain ones groan and growl a specific way that the band started to realize itself could become the compositional germ of a song.
Herein is the threshold of a new explosion of the band’s creativity, replacing the comparatively cleaner buzz of the Sonic Youth EP with guitars that spew fractured, uglier chunks of sound everywhere, held down by menacing minimalist basslines (actually played by Thurston on half of this LP, and for the only time ever on Protect Me You, Lee) and the brutalyetcontrolled metronomic drumming of Jim Sclavunos, augmented with replacement drummer Bob Bert’s notable bashing on Making the Nature Scene and grotty nofi live rendition of I Wanna Be Your Dog.
Hearing the crashed window intro of Inhuman and subwaybrake screech of The World Looks Red, you can attest that while Sonic Youth’s guitars are not quite yet being utilized in the totally controlled, lyrical fashion seen later on albums like Evol, Daydream Nation et al., they were well aware of the colors and tonalities that were unfolding and the possibilities presented.