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Originally Posted by deflinus
i was thinking about this when i was driving and listening to Wildflower Soul (awesome song)
before Jim entered the picture, i loved the way their songs sort of ran with each other. mostly in their Washing Machine, ATL and NYCG+F albums. they barely followed song structure. i think in the book (Goodbye20thCentury), it was described as guitars running parallel to each other. Wildflower Soul was great like that.
but then Jim came in and sort of structured the way they wrote. I love Sonic Nurse and loved the way Jim influenced them, but i feel since Jim's gone - they should go back to the way they wrote songs before. more free form and more original structures. I listen to the Eternal now and it's a great album but i feel they're sticking to these 'rock song formulas'. i don't know, my two cents.
i'm glad Eternal's getting good reviews but i sort of wish they made another pre-Jim record. rather than post-Jim
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I agree with this very much and it is well put. A Thousand Leaves is such a great record because it's totally weird and illogical. It took me a while to get the brilliance of the last two songs on it, but now I appreciate them more than most of their cannon.
I'm really happy with this straightforward rock effort, though. It's just a great album, and I'm going to try to not analyze it too much. If it were a first album by a new band, I would be going crazy for it. The fact that it's Sonic Youth puts a lot of pressure on the direction it goes.
One thing that is a criticism, I felt like on their pre-Jim stuff, each album had a sound that totally separated it from any other release. It was like, you could tell which album each track was off of, even if you didn't know. Everything post Murray Street seems like it could be on any of the four releases.