A college syllabus could revolve around its vast allusions to Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, The Great Gatsby, and Alfred Hitchcock. The entire record is a shadow.ĮVOL was not just a skewering of rock’n’roll but also of America. There’s a directness that makes everything feel close. If Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth’s opus, EVOL was crucial research. Gordon once called the sound of Downtown “abandoned,” and that fits here, too. EVOL is “underground” as both form and aesthetic: deconstructed and raw, dim and boomy. But on EVOL, the pieces were still laid bare: bent glitter-pop here, macabre spoken-word there, gauzy instrumental noise, a persistent clatter, all with a reverby DIY iridescence that sounds buried in the ground. Pettibon’s black-and-white cover illustration for 1990’s Goo became an eternal RayBanned shorthand for wry art-punk cool. In her liner notes to the 1993 CD edition, transgressive zine writer Lisa Suckdog quoted Moore’s lyrics: “‘I left home for experience’-me, too!’”īy 1988’s Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth’s deep inquiry into pop and the avant-garde-into Madonna on the one hand and La Monte Young on the other-had cohered into a fundamental sound. As if to assert their Downtown identity, the album opens with the somnambulant churn of “Tom Violence,” a song inspired by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which narrates a classic renegade pose.
Sonic Youth was subterranean subway clangor windowless bohemia a fast-walking stomp on a sidewalk grate the hallowed doors of Trash & Vaudeville a secret. This ultimately showed how unmistakably East Village the Sonic Youth camp was. Sonic Youth began to fuse with lawless West Coast punk: Minutemen and Black Flag versus sadistic cops and sun-bleached strip-mall banality. EVOL, the band’s sordid third LP, released in 1986, was their first of two pivotal albums for SST. This clip from Weatherman ‘69-shot and directed by the band’s SST Records comrade and eventual art world fixture Raymond Pettibon-remains a shining document of Sonic Youth’s anarchic era on that L.A.
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