Rarer than hen’s teeth on these shores since its release in 1993, Sonic Youth’s ‘Whores moaning’ EP (a cunning skit on Nirvana’s ‘hormoaning’ released the year before) is a five track EP that was only made available in Australia and New Zealand and has only found its way into the global market thanks to Record Store Day, a day designed to finally give independent retailers the recognition and shot in the arm that they so desperately need in these financially turbulent times.
With Sonic Youth notoriously supportive of the independent sector (and indeed of vinyl – check out the sleeve of ‘Washing Machine’ and you’ll see what I mean) it seems only fitting that a day given in honour of independent retailers and vinyl should have something from the band and this rare gem is the perfect choice providing UK fans a chance to finally get their hands on one of the band’s coolest EPs (the ‘Dirty boots EP’ with its ballistic version of ‘white kross’ wins the first prize) pressed on a stunning electric blue 12” platter and boasting the original artwork created by Kurt (or Kurdt as he is credited on the sleeve) Cobain.
Of the five tracks on offer, all appeared on the 2003 re-issue of ‘Dirty’ with the exception of the well-done edit of ‘Sugar Kane’ but that’s surely not the point, rather this is a collector’s gem that was featured in the booklet of the aforementioned release and which allowed Sonic Youth fans to dribble gently over a piece of vinyl that they’d never had the opportunity to see (it’s hard work being a fan, but there you go) and to hear these tracks with the reassuring crackle of the needle slowly scratching the life out of the disc seems somehow far more right than hearing them in the sterile environment of a random collection of B sides and demos… or maybe that’s just me.
Still, for those of you who don’t know the release, the tracks include a couple of covers (‘personality crisis’ by the New York Dolls and ‘Is it my body’ by Alice Cooper) as well as well as two off-cuts from album sessions: ‘the end of the end of the ugly’ (a primitive version of ‘shoot’) and the damn-near essential ‘tamra’ which is an eight-minute spacey instrumental of the type that only Sonic Youth could ever pull off successfully; and all of the tracks work damn well together despite their disparate sources. While no re-master or any other technical jiggery-pokery has taken place, the sound quality of all tracks is still outstanding – warm and commandingly loud, and, as I suggested earlier, any real Sonic youth fan will have to have this no matter what anyway as a result of its strictly limited format (6000 copies world-wide) and the guilty pleasure of having Kurt’s bizarrely anarchistic artwork in a decent size rather than in miniature in a CD booklet. Finally, there’s also the fact that ‘whores moaning’ provides a timely reminder of Sonic youth’s most popularist period. While the band went on to make records of equal, if not greater, stature and will no doubt continue to do so, one of the joys of a Sonic Youth record is that each one is a snapshot of the band’s progress to that point and this piece of vinyl took me right back to my alternative-rock addled teens when I worshipped my near-worn-out copy of ‘1991, the year punk broke’ (soon to be reissued!!!!) and when I first discovered a band whom I have continued to love and follow right up to the present day. This is a limited, beautiful piece of vinyl that will make any fan of the band weep with joy, track one down if you only can.
