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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