Originally released without the band’s consent, The Walls Have Ears has proven to be one of the most enduring Sonic Youth bootlegs, which is no mean feat considering how many there are. Now reissued via the band’s own Goofin’ imprint, this double vinyl is pretty much the holy grail for Sonic Youth collectors, bringing together material from three sets recorded back in 1985, when the band were blazing a trail of alt-rock dynamics so far in advance of the competition, that most wouldn’t catch up to it for another five years at least. Recorded variously in London (tracks 1- 7, captured on Oct 30, 1985), Brighton (track 8, captured Nov 8, 1985), and London (tracks 9 – 17, April 28, 1985), the band are remarkably consistent in the strength of their delivery, tearing into tracks from their self-titled EP, Confusion Is Sex, the awesome Kill Yr Idols EP, the recently released Bad Moon Rising, and even E.V.O.L. which was, at that time, a year in the future.
The Package
Beautifully pressed, this new vinyl edition sounds and looks fantastic. It comes housed in a gatefold sleeve, with printed liners (disc 2 features the track-listing and details), and a sticker reminding us of the album’s relative importance. The vinyl itself is on black platters, and is gloriously crackle free – with each side neatly grouped so that the breaks feel natural and the flow is not interrupted. The only thing lacking here is the ephemera that Silver Current Records thoughtfully included in their recent Live In Brooklyn release, which was a lovely touch; but otherwise, this is a stunning package for an historic release.
The Album
Side A opens with a bizarre MC telling the audience to shut up for two minutes so he can outline the corrupted nature of the music business – although the crowd seem to take it with good humour. Then the band do appear, they lope into the dark hippy trip of the then-unreleased Green Love, a jam that links early Sonic Youth with what the Swans were slowly becoming in the wake of their trauma-fuelled no-wave outpourings. It sets the scene for these first seven tracks, the band neatly segueing into the sonic horror of Brother James, a surprisingly disciplined take on a blistering highlight from the Kill Yr Idols EP. Clearly fired up, the band follow it up with a rather more sprawling take on the title track, Thurston howling “sonic death” as if his life depended upon it – which, at the time, it probably did. Concluding with a brief snippet of Madonna’s Into The Groove – predicting Ciccone Youth and titled “Mad” Groove – it sees the band cool the rising temperatures as they slip into the hypnotic pulse of I Love Her All The Time, all tribal rhythms and scattered guitar noise leading to a tumultuous climax that seems to explode like psychedelic fireworks behind the eyes.
Side B opens on a short, middle-eastern segue, making you wonder if there’s a pressing issue, before Thurston announces Expressway To Yr Skull as the last song (spoiler alert, it’s not). A lengthy and tense exploration of the song’s inner dynamics, it further reinforces Neil Young’s claim that the song is one of the greatest guitar songs ever, and it’s easy to imagine the saucer-eyed audience basking in the reflective glory of another track that was yet to be recorded. The oddly, “is-it-a-rarity” titled Spahn Ranch Dance (introduced by Thurston variously as “a couple of Alice Cooper songs” and “a couple of Grand Funk Railroad songs”), turns out to be an utterly unhinged rendition of Death Valley ‘69, the escalating guitar violence matched by Kim and Thurston trading vocals with fire and fury. It concludes the set beautifully and leaves the listener with a mild case of concussion, even some forty years after the event. In contrast, the only track to be culled from the Brighton show, “Blood On Brighton Beach”, is a disguised and grimly recorded Making The Nature Scene. Unlike the first seven tracks, which have remarkable clarity, it sounds like it was recorded on cassette from the back of the venue, with only Kim’s vocal and heavily distorted bass audible amidst the mush. It’s hardly surprising that it’s tucked away at the end of the side and yet, for all that it sounds like something you’d have picked up on hand-decorated cassette from a sinister market trader back in 1991, it’s delivered with such unearthly grace by Kim, that you can’t tear your ears away.
Opening side C, the uncomfortable sound experiment of Burning Spear sees the band take a rare trip back to their self-titled and rarely heard EP. Despite the grimy post-punk sound of the EP itself (the only time Sonic Youth would experiment with such clean lines), it’s rendered here is a format that perfectly complements the approach taken on Confusion is Sex and Bad Moon Rising, and you’d be hard pressed to assume it wasn’t drawn from one of those records, especially when it collapses into Death Valley ’69. Rather more sneering than the version that appears earlier on this album (but which was tracked later in the year), it features vocals from Thurston and Lee, rather than Kim – making it an essential early take on the song. It concludes in a squall of ear-raping feedback, loosely titled Speed Jamc, before the band plunge into the similarly feedback-strewn sound collage of Ghost Bitch, which is only slightly tarnished by an ever-present amp buzz that threatens to overwhelm the dark dynamics the band display.
Side D opens with an unlisted I’m Insane from Bad Moon Rising, with eerie percussion scraping a surface of noise and pulsing bass. Then, we see the band cementing those Swans links with World Looks Red, gifted by Gira to the band and recorded on Confusion Is Sex. Another early E.V.O.L. track appears next and although it’s oddly listed on the cover as The Word, you can clearly hear the band introduce it as Flower. A hypnotic masterclass, it shows just how advanced Sonic Youth were when it came to material development, and you can only imagine what it must have been for the audience to experience the power of a track that had not even been recorded at that point. The code for Brother Jam-z is rather easier to crack, the band once again unleashing a dark highlight form their early years, while the album closer, Killed + Kicked Off is, in fact, a chaotic Kill Yr Idols truncated by the organisers cutting the power.
Conclusions
For Sonic Youth fans, there can never be too much live material, for this most mercurial of bands truly never played the same set twice. Hearing them feeling their way from the early years of noise experimentation towards the more structured approach that would run loosely from E.V.O.L. to Washing Machine is a joy, and you can feel the tension between the savage punk whiteouts of Brother James and the genuinely progressive ebb and flow of tracks like Flower. There never has been and never will be a band to touch Sonic Youth for experimentation and the joy they took in the act of creation, and The Walls Have Ears is the perfect testament to the band’s early years of frantic evolution. 10/10
