The Triumph of Youth

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Listening to a new Sonic Youth CD is like taking a holiday. Not an easy vacation like, say, skiing in Vail, but more like an adventure tour, the musical equivalent of climbing a particularly high peak without bottled oxygen. Traditional rock can be a sad grind--for example, on Eric Clapton's wan new CD, Pilgrim, one of the few listenable songs, Sick and Tired, turns out to have disturbing lyrics about threatening to blow out a woman's brains.

It's rock shocks like that--when pop music parts, Red Sea-like, to reveal all the misogyny and ugliness beneath--that gave rise to progressive/alternative rock in the early '80s. And one of the champions of the form over the past 17 years has been the New York City band Sonic Youth. "We got past the hardest part together," says band member Thurston Moore, 39, "which was getting through our 20s and 30s together." Sonic Youth doesn't embrace the swagger and sexual bravado of mainstream rock. The band's lyrics are often deliberately remote, seeking to capture, through abstract imagery, the wildness of adolescence, the plight of junkies and losers, and the social frustrations that come with gender barriers. Sonic Youth's members present themselves not as saviors but as everyday sorts who happen to have instruments.

The band's new CD, A Thousand Leaves (Geffen), is one of its best. The quartet--singer-bassist Kim Gordon, drummer Steve Shelley and singer-guitarists Lee Ranaldo and Moore (who is married to Gordon)--has always been given to experimentation, but on this CD the Sonics bring it off with new vigor and maturity.

A number of songs stand out. One track, Sunday, has a soothing, rambling melody. Another, Female Mechanic Now On Duty, with its screeching, spiraling guitars and spoken-sung vocals, is a commentary on rock journalism. "It's a little bit of an answer song," says Gordon. "The media, which are predominantly made up of men, are always writing what they think 'women in rock' is, and it always winds up being some sexually seductive object." The band is at its best on the nine-minute song Wildflower Soul. It's a ballad that moves smartly from tangles of arty noise to stretches of grace. A Thousand Leaves isn't always easy to listen to, but it's always fascinating.

Today the genre that Sonic Youth helped create--alternative rock--is slipping creatively. "The industry only turned to alternative rock because they thought they'd find another half-dozen Nirvanas," says Ranaldo. "When they didn't, they dropped it like a cold fish and left a lot of bands--" Moore finishes his thought: "--flopping on the shore."

Sonic Youth has never tried to be an arena-filling band. By quietly and resolutely continuing to make its own fiercely avant-garde, unabashedly personal music, it has created a space for itself. While many careerist bands lie gasping for air, Sonic Youth swims on, looking for deeper, uncharted waters.

--By Christopher John Farley