{"id":6064,"date":"2009-06-16T11:57:09","date_gmt":"2009-06-16T15:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=6064"},"modified":"2009-06-16T11:57:09","modified_gmt":"2009-06-16T15:57:09","slug":"listening-to-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=6064","title":{"rendered":"Listening To..."},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><strong>Sonic Youth - The Eternal<\/strong>. I haven't really dug a new SY album since 1994. And even that one (<i>Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star<\/i>) was exciting mostly because the four albums before it were so good - on its own, <i>Jet Set<\/i> isn't great, but after two albums that were great, but were also clearly attempts at commercial success, it felt like an interesting experiment, so I could understand and accept it. After a couple of listens, though, and contrary to all the reviews I've read, this new album doesn't even feel like an experiment to me; I hear nothing new; it sounds exactly like I thought it would. Not even adding Pavement's bassist makes it stand out. I don't think I could have said that about any SY album pre-94.\n<p>\"White Kross\" from SY's <i>Sister<\/i> (1987) just popped up on the iPod. It kills. Even though it's slathered in reverb and muddy production, the song just bristles with energy. The band's on fire. There's nothing like that on the new SY record.<\/p>\n<li><strong>Green Day - whatever the new album is called<\/strong>. It's too long. Too much of it sounds like things they've already written. I know Green Day's not really known for their experimentation, but <em>come on<\/em> - listening to a new album shouldn't feel like a game of Name That Tune.\n<li><strong>The Decembrists - The Hazards Of Love<\/strong>. Oy... another fucking Decembrists record. Why do I buy these things? I don't have the attention span, nor the time, to sit through another album-length story told by that guy and his fucking <em>voice<\/em>.\n<li><strong>Nod - Tree Stuff And Lightning<\/strong>. Now Nod <em>can<\/em> do a change-up. Sometimes they sound like a stone-drunk jazz fusion band, or a demented Vaselines-style indie-pop band, or a blues band playing left-handed in the dark, on a boat in the middle of a nor'easter. Sure, everything they do is irreverent and crazed, sometimes unlistenably so. And a Nod album always sounds unmistakably like a Nod album, but they don't sound alike; each new album sounds <em>freshly<\/em> unhinged. They're not recycling the same cliches, unlike some other bands I could name. Nod wins.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sonic Youth - The Eternal. I haven't really dug a new SY album since 1994. And even that one (Experimental Jet Set, Trash &#038; No Star) was exciting mostly because the four albums before it were so good - on its own, Jet Set isn't great, but after two albums that were great, but were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-listening-to","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}