Sonic Youth stay current despite fads
By JENNA DUNCAN
Get Out

For almost three decades, New York City art rockers Sonic Youth have been churning out experimental space rock, putting the stronghold on the hearts of indie music fans worldwide.

So when the Sonics learned that this year’s Lollapalooza tour — which they were slated to play — was cancelled, they weren’t too disappointed, knowing their fans would still turn out for their summer tour dates.

“(Lollapalooza) entails playing these big, open-air festivals where the sound isn’t always that good and we wind up playing these truncated 60-minute sets,” says guitarist and vocalist Lee Ranaldo. ‘‘It helps us to reach a bigger audience and challenges us, but we end up in a less-than-ideal environment to play music.”

Never strangers to social and political commentary, the group’s new album, “Sonic Nurse” opens with tracks criticizing disposable pop icons (Justin Timberlake and Mariah Carey) and closes with the Neil Young-esque folk anthem, “Peace Attack.” The song is laden with subdued anti-war imagery and whispers of the power of rock to sway popular opinion.

Avant garde perfectionists — fine-tuning erratic distortion into a sound all their own — the Sonics work like a modern-day Velvet Underground. They are a collective unit that brings ideas to their private recording studio, Echo Canyon in Lower Manhattan, fleshes them out and expands on them during jams.

“The songs evolve live in two senses. Often they are written in the studio, or someone comes with an idea and there’s collaboration,” Ranaldo says. “A lot of the time we don’t play the new songs live until after the record has been made.”

When they begin a tour after an album release, new songs become fuller — “more aggressive,” according to Ranaldo — from the energy of the performance.

“Almost every song has changed a lot from live play,” he says.

Their performances also have benefited from the addition of producer/guitarist Jim O’rourke. A long-time experimenter in the “noise” scene, O’rourke collaborated with the Sonics on some releases on their independent SYR label and a musical friendship was spawned.

“(Adding O’rourke) has changed the play of a lot of songs live, because he has such a different style,” Ranaldo says. “Sometimes Jim takes over on bass, which frees Kim (Gordon) up to just be the singer.”

Although the Sonics have enjoyed successful record sales through their major-label dealings with DGC, most of their music videos of the past decade have not been widely available. The band recently released “Corporate Ghost: Videos 1990-2002,” a comprehensive collection of their videos made since their 1990 major-label debut, “Goo.”

“When we made ‘Goo,’ ... it was more viable to make videos,” Ranaldo says. “We had several friends who were directors and we were able to bring them in. We saw ‘Goo’ as kind of a video album.”

When the album was released, MTV was still a relatively new format and was freer from commercial pressures to experiment with its content.

“Now, there really aren’t as many places to show the videos as regularly or avidly as back then. Our videos would not be played on MTV,” Ranaldo says.