Something I just realized about myself today is that I like for my music to comprise “broad strokes” — things like long songs, widely juxtaposed segments of songs and generally new groundwork lain in stretching time. A classic case in point of what I’m talking about would be the brilliant Hum album from 2020, Inlet, which contains only eight songs but stretches out into a 55-minute bath of velvety guitar and otherworldly vibe. Hum call Champaign, Illinois home and I don’t think this is coincidental — life is the Midwest is a very deliberate, genuine affair, calling, I think, for an increased level of the establishment of music’s feeling, as opposed, say, to just rattling off a bunch of “ideas” that would happen to be “cute” or humorous, so to speak. Louisville’s My Morning Jacket and their album Z, with particular regard to “Lay Low,” a classic pop tune which devolves into an endless guitar orgy, would be a similar case.
And not to say I’m doing too bad (certainly not for lack of searching) but I could use a little bit of new music to sublimate some of the bad energy I get from work and from a roommate who’s always watching TV. Just this morning, at the exact time I made that realization about “broad strokes,” I manifested a particular craving for a certain digestible brand of noise rock, which would be something like a median between Sonic Youth’s “Silver Rocket” and Yo La Tengo’s “The Story of Jazz.” And I mean, I’ve listened to Daydream Nation like a million times, but I could always listen to it again, I suppose. It’s a gargantuan beast full of seven-minute songs and endless noise jams, which would seem to cater to exactly what I were seeking. (By the way, a big “fu** you” to Pitchfork for lowering it to seventh on their last list out of Black Lives Matter Purple-Rain-pandering… it’s far and away the best album of the ’80s and Pitchfork truly relinquishes all credibility by that move in trying to be some booty-shaking “cool,” the opposite of their cultural foundation.) Subsequently, all of Sonic Youth’s albums, with the exception of a couple tracks like maybe “Mildred Pierce” on Goo and “Quest for the Cup” on the underrated Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, have been relatively subdued and also expedited, more prone to pop and a quick, pocket tablet of controlled rocking development. Nobody in the ’90s really did epic other than TOOL, for whatever reason. Granted, it was a time when songwriting, when melancholy, were on everybody’s plate. But venturing out into the blank physicality of winter of 2022 makes me crave music that’s physical and that pierces the status quo of what we think of as sonic groundwork, just like out great godfathers of the ’80s once did.
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