Tower of Glower: On Sonic Youth’s Walls Have Ears
How the band learned to stop worrying and love the bootleg
It is one thing to release a live album. It is another thing to release one featuring selections from many different concerts.
It is a whole other thing entirely, however, to chop up three specific concerts and shuffle the pieces like playing cards in a deck. These are the kinds of things bootleg releases can get away with, and for the last 38 years, 1986’s Walls Have Ears — compiled by former Blast First Records head Paul Smith from three 1985 UK Sonic Youth sets — was a bootleg. Now, thanks to the glories of post-Long Tail nostalgia capitalism, fans can purchase a remastered version of this artifact from the band legally, in assorted formats, and it is raw, rude and delightfully weird.
“Throughout the UK and Europe, we reacquainted ourselves with what were now becoming familiar spaces with familiar faces: Rote Fabrik, Melkweg, De Effenaar, Vera, Sputnik,” guitarist Thurston Moore wrote about the tour in his 2023 memoir Sonic Life. “The audiences, whether fifty people or a few hundred, now began to show up with more of a preconception of what Sonic Youth had to offer: the promise of some musical intrigue.”
Heaviest on selections from 1983’s Kill Yr. Idols EP and 1985’s Bad Moon Rising LP, this now official boot highlights a favorite era for Sonic Youth diehards, where a strong Glenn Branca influence was paramount and the baseline was chanting, clamor, percussive over-emphasis, noise. Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo – Steve Shelley drums on some tracks, Bob Bert rocks the kit on others – aren’t much for stage banter, threats to cover Alice Cooper aside. (This is probably this band’s only live recording that opens with someone ordering the crowd to “shut your fucking face”.) And so for all Walls Have Ears sounds fiercely post-industrial and pre-brownout rough and tumble, it also sounds like work. You can hear it in road ragged vocal takes and yelled stage directions to crews before the songs congeal and explode.
And since hard work disorients, the temporal displacement fits: the snippets of Indian party music and Madonna’s “Into The Groove,” Moore announcing a third of the way into the tracklist that a crushing “Expressway to Yr. Skull” is “the last song” when two songs earlier a torrid, panicked “Kill Yr. Idols” likely kicked open a set (and smash cut directly into a sweaty, dazed “I Love Her All the Time”).
Throughout, the band is terrifying and dangerous in the best sense, and while the mix charitably foregrounds vocals, the power of the music itself is hardly diminished. Gordon rips through both iterations of “Brother James” like she’s pursued or possessed by a demon; “Burning Spear” is flaming pile of rhythm and dissonance and “The World Looks Red” sounds even more like a cut rate horror movie here than the Confusion Is Sex original did.
But the song that leapt out at and bothered me most on Walls Have Ears is “Death Valley ‘69”, situated twice in the middle of the tracklist, the first instance labeled as “Spahn Dance Ranch”. That proximity threw an intense spotlight on its lyrics, which have traditionally been overshadowed for this listener by the squalling guitar hooks. The verses are a saw slicing rationality to pieces, blasting impressionistically into a world beyond conscious action or thought, and coupled with the taut and fevered performances here, the song becomes wholly and genuinely frightening.
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- Tower of Glower: On Sonic Youth’s Walls Have Ears - February 16, 2024
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