Exceptional Sibling
Thirty-Five Years of Sonic Youth’s SISTER
You remember the ’80s, don’t you? The awful, bloated, empty 1980s? The truth of the matter is, few other decades have produced so much great underground rock music (and underground music in general) as that awful decade did. And, with hindsight, one band seems to stand out at the centre of it all: Sonic Youth.
The double-length Daydream Nation is generally regarded as their best album of the period (it’s been given a prestigious berth in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, along with the likes of Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Rev. M. L. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech), but it is its 1987 predecessor, Sister, which I must single out as a personal favourite and as an album more indicative of the band’s overall approach and capabilities.
Sister was the second SY album to feature Steve Shelley on drums; the former Crucifucks drummer having joined guitarists Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon in mid 1985 in the midst of the Bad Moon Rising tour. It was originally released on SST Records in the US and Canada in June of ’87. Blast First and several other indie labels released it simultaneously in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. Its title is said to reference the fraternal twin sister of sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick (1928–1982). The infant girl, who died shortly after birth, allegedly plagued Dick’s memories his entire life. The title is also reflected in the lyrics of the opening number, ‘Schizophrenia’, which surrealistically recounts a visit to “an old friend” and his sister, who claims that “Jesus had a twin / who knew nothing about sin.”
Like all the best Sonic Youth albums, Sister is a noisy, beautiful amalgam of eras and genres — sometimes they’re The Pink Floyd, sometimes they’re The Ramones; sometimes they’re Dinosaur Jr, sometimes they’re even Rush. That’s what being Sonic Youth was all about, actually — that, and their rather original approach to guitar-tuning.
It should be noted that there are at least a couple of things that are significantly singular about Sister, though. In regards to nomenclature, it’s the only album on which the definite article ‘the’ comes into play: the original album on SST is officially known as Sister LP 1987 and credited to The Sonic-Youth. A hats-off to the first three Pink Floyd albums, maybe?
As a body of musical work, the ten tracks that comprise it are quite singular for being literally singular: unlike the vast majority of Sonic Youth albums before and after, Sister doesn’t come with any ‘companion pieces’ or peripheral material. No singles were released off the album, so there are no edited versions or non-album B-sides. No unique sessions were recorded for the John Peel Show or other radio programmes prior to the album sessions, and there appears to have been no studio outtakes; so there are no related EPs, bootleg or official. As a result, when it comes to CD bonus tracks and remastered reissues, fans have had to settle for only the ‘non-beatbox version’ of ‘Master-Dik’ — the title track from their rather novel SST EP released five months after Sister. Other than the “Sister” Interview Disc, a promotional interview LP released in September of the same year, Sister stands alone. (Though two official ‘bootlegs’ would later document the ’87 Sister Tour: Hold That Tiger, a 1991 live album recorded at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago and subtitled Sonic Sister Live; and ‘Cotton Crown’ / ‘Pacific Coast Highway’, a 1993 seven-inch single recorded at The Town & Country in London, England.)
One thing that I found so appealing about Sonic Youth was something that so many other bands failed to have by the 1980s: a good sense of ‘overall package’. I’m talking about a combination of intriguing lyrics, well-conceived music, a ‘catchy’ visual image, and artistic album covers. Sonic Youth had it all, and their ’87 album exemplified that completeness par excellence.
Lyrically, there are occasions on Sister when Moore and Ranaldo seem to be channeling Philip K. Dick via Jim Morrison or Lou Reed; e.g., Moore’s ‘Stereo Sanctity’:
I’m keeping my commission to faith’s transmission
Two speakers dream the same and skies turn red
Satellites flashing down Orchard and Delancey
I can’t get laid ’cause everyone is dead
Hey — gold connections
Analog soul waving in yr hair
Hey — hylozoic directions
She’s talking blue streaks everywhere
The spoken-word section in the latter half of Ranaldo’s ‘Pipeline / Kill Time’ and the style in which it’s written on the enclosed lyric sheet suggest an influence of 1950s and ’60s Beat poetry:
bright glass on a chain being wound around us
the toiling of idle hands
dripping,
w guilt
a secret form of punishment
axes thru skulls
shadow of futility
endless / revolt
the shifting of light and shadows
dividing each existence
Musically, Sister is a grungy, rocked-up arse-kicker compared to its immediate predecessor (1986’s EVOL). There’s distortion and wa-wa and static all over the place. The numbers were recorded at (Walter Sear’s) Sear Sound utilising an all-tube sixteen-track board, and the result is a rather warm yet slightly volatile sound that approximated the band’s live sound at the time. ‘(I Got A) Catholic Block’ features a brief flurry of patch-cable static and random notes followed by some lead-in picking by Ranaldo that actually brings late-’70s Alex Lifeson to mind. Like the brief and quasi-psychedelic ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye’ that immediately follows, it also utilises acoustic guitar for a melodic layer. Side-two opener ‘Tuff Gnarl’ is a melodic ‘stream-of-consciousness’ ballad that is rendered asymmetrical by a slow-building crescendo of roaring, whirring guitars that sign the number over and out. Gordon’s retro-noirish ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ recalls the Bad Moon Rising album musically as well as conceptually; it features an almost bluesy, ’70s-style lead-guitar break hemmed in between two noisy sequences of grating axe strings and clashing percussion that resemble nothing as much as an indie-rock approach to Japanese Kabuki theatre. A cover of Crime’s ‘Hot Wire My Heart’ (1976) and the album-closing ‘White Cross’ provide an old-school punk-rock vibe, not unlike that of Daydream Nation’s ‘Silver Rocket’ and Goo’s ‘Mary Christ’. Sandwiched between these two tracks is ‘Cotton Crown’ (or ‘Kotton Krown’), a slow Moore-Gordon duet that would not have sounded completely out of place on Spacemen 3’s Playing With Fire a year and a half later.
Then there’s the original/uncensored album cover, front and back, before the images started to be removed for reissues for fear of reprisals from Disney and photographer Richard Avedon. The collage art on the cover serves as the perfect visual reflection of the chaos in the music. I can remember publishing or posting an article over a decade ago in which I pointed out the similarity between the Sister cover art and the collages of Carlos Ginzburg. I still stand by that.
As far as its legacy goes, Sister is rather unique in that it may be the only Sonic Youth album that has received more love and appreciation from fans and even critics than what it has the band itself. Judging from his comments over the years, Moore seems to prefer EVOL, calling it “good” on at least one occasion while Sister was merely “OK”. Steve Shelley has called the album “funky” and “weird”. He has been particularly critical of the drum sound, blaming engineer Bill Titus, who was an “older guy” who “wasn’t interested in [their] ideas”, and who thought that they were “out to lunch”. (I Dreamed of Noise, Ignacio Julià and Jaime Gonzalo, 1994)
Interestingly, Gordon’s view of the album has been more in keeping with that of the listening public:
“I like Sister a lot. The Sister sound of the drums is kind of bad but everything else sounds great. It’s my favourite cover, I think. It’s really funny because every record was sort of a landmark, and Sister was a landmark because that was the first record that Christgau [Robert Christgau, Village Voice music critic] liked.” (I Dreamed of Noise, Ignacio Julià and Jaime Gonzalo, 1994).
I have suggested several times over the years that if Sister had been expanded to double-album length, complete with extended jams and improvs, then it would be celebrated today as Sonic Youth’s early magnum opus — not Daydream Nation. Imagine if you will a Sister in which ‘Schizophrenia’ takes half of side one and ‘Pipeline’ and ‘P.C.H.’ comprise the entirety of sides two and three.
All in all, Sister was — and still is — a brilliant way to spend some 37 minutes or so. “Seven!”
“SEVEN!”
