Sister (1987)

Sister was long the null Sonic Youth album in my experience—the proclaimed favorite of many SY fans even today, but the one that never particularly seemed worth second listens whenever I tried it again. So this will have to be something of a mea culpa and I’ll make it quick. Maybe it was lost on me in the backward-casting incandescent glow of Daydream Nation, which brought me back to the band after writing them off years earlier as hopelessly enamored of pigfuck noise, in-your-face attitude, and little more (maybe now I have to revisit Confusion Is Sex and Bad Moon Rising again after all this time?). Plus, honestly, I don’t know how you call anything else but Daydream Nation their best. I was charmed by the loopy experimentalism of EVOL and even The Whitey Album but nothing about Sister ever particularly stuck. So I sat down with it recently for a few weeks and played it a lot and finally must agree it’s a good one. The song titles alone are remarkably evocative, these clipped and cryptic two-word constructions: “Catholic Block,” “Cotton Crown,” “Tuff Gnarl,” “White Cross” (which seems to be about low-grade speed). At one point, I couldn’t seem to get enough of the admittedly rapey “Pacific Coast Highway,” which comes roaring in like a pack of clowns in a jeep playing banjos. It’s comical and it’s menacing and it’s introspective and then it pummels on a return, with Kim Gordon playing the role of the Green River Killer (as I imagined it, suitable for the timeframe) making the pitch to “come on get in the car, let’s go for a ride somewhere.” Maybe a virtue for Sister lovers is the relative brevity of these tracks, which barely break five minutes if that, as compared to the oceanic workups of the double-LP Daydream Nation. Sister might also be the album where the attack of the strange tunings is most thoughtfully honed. From the opening “Schizophrenic” on they are in high form, moody, wounding, always slightly wrong, and feeling unique from track to track. They sound strange but you’re not always sure why. The more I hear Sister the more I realize how little it sounds like anything else except themselves in an unusually purified mode. Well, “Hot Wire My Heart” seems to preen with its influences, sounding like “Sister Ray” in the verses—is it an elliptical source of this album’s title?—and “Sweet Sweet Heart” (or something by the Vibrators from Pure Mania). It works great. The whole album is good. Don’t miss it if you can.