Sonic Youth: Still making noise

Sonic Youth older, wiser--and as relevant as ever

By Mike Prevatt

Venerable alternative rock group Sonic Youth hasn't played Las Vegas in such a long time that drummer Steve Shelley can't even remember the last time the band played there.

"I was thinking about that today," he says. "Correct me if I'm wrong, I thought it was [at] Calamity Jayne's with Nirvana."

He's wrong--there was a March 1993 gig at the Huntridge for the band's "Dirty Soup" tour. But it's easy to see why that other gig sticks out in Shelley's memory. That's the infamous 1990 show where a pre-"Smells Like Teen Spirit" Nirvana was booed off the stage. As Kurt Cobain ran backstage to throw a tantrum, the crowd chanted the headlining band's name.

And Sonic Youth should encounter a similarly anticipatory crowd when it plays the House of Blues on Friday, given its 11-year absence from Las Vegas, a city where the musical landscape has changed to a large extent. Gone is the stigma that local venues don't attract innovative, left-of-center bands, thanks to visits from touring acts like Sigur Ros, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Wilco and Mogwai--all who, coincidentally, because of their noise-pop aesthetic, college-rock appeal and major-label backgrounds, owe some sort of debt to the trailblazing Sonic Youth.

And like those younger bands--maybe even more so--Sonic Youth is considered a cult favorite. Yet while that label all but ensures the New York-based band forever retains its cool factor, it seems it also limits the potential size of its audience.

"I think we like anyone to listen to us," says Shelley. "I think maybe people get scared off a little bit. We're sort of a band everyone has heard of but not everyone has heard. I think a lot of people think that, if they came to see us, we'd be a ball of noise, where actually it's a quite excellent rock show, when we have a good night. Maybe the `cult band' [tag] kind of keeps some people away who might really enjoy what we do."

Sonic Youth has a reputation for adventurous, must-see-once-in-your-lifetime performances that are at once improvisational, meditative, harmonic and exact. Its sound--influenced mostly by 1970s punk/avant-garde artists, from the Velvet Underground and Television to the Stooges and Patti Smith--begs for live presentations that are simultaneously exploratory and traditional. A song like 1995's "The Diamond Sea"--one of the band's best--highlights its inherent tunefulness, as well as its penchant for squalling feedback climaxes.

This approach is widely reflected on Sonic Youth's new album, Sonic Nurse, which, like its 2002 predecessor Murray Street, has won praise for both its strong songwriting and its accomplished creativity, though the results weren't exactly intentional. "It's just the way these songs came together," says Shelley. "We always think of the songs as being structured and melodic, it's just what your definition of structure and melody is. We never write anti-songs. We think a song structure is a really open thing. A song can be a lot of different things."

This is also the second consecutive album on which Sonic Youth is a five-piece, as longtime collaborator/producer Jim O'Rourke--who has also lent a hand on the last two Wilco albums--has been fully absorbed into the band.

"It's just a natural progression of working together, of finding someone you can relate to, working with them in different aspects on a project," says Shelley. "It's sort of like, we do whatever it takes to get it done. So, someone's engineering or playing--we all work together and get the stuff to happen."

Sonic Youth recently had an opportunity to reflect on its legacy, as it compiled videos and archived footage for its first DVD compilation, the recently released Corporate Ghost. But the band doesn't dwell on its age much. You'd think it would give the band pause as to how long it has managed to thrive both personally and artistically--it's a rarity for a musical act to survive for 23 years, much less remain as relevant and enthusiastic as it ever did in the same amount of time.

"It gets to the point where you're sort of out there alone," says Shelley. "There's no one else from our generation that's still doing it like [this]."