Despite falling in love with the ubercool sound of Teen Age Riot at first listen after finding it on one of the free CDs that came with the short-lived Rock CD magazine, and despite being impressed enough by both ‘100%_ and ‘Sugar Kane_ to go out and buy Dirty not once but twice - first on cassette, before upgrading to CD years later, it seems that the light of my love for Sonic Youth flickered only briefly.

rcd magazinePerhaps there’s just too much Sonic Youth to know where to begin. Perhaps there’s just too much cool, and I just don’t know how to penetrate it. Perhaps it’s just one of those really annoying times when I get so fixated on one or two tracks from an album that I just forget to listen to the rest (as is currently happening with the new album from The War on Drugs, and An Ocean In Between The Waves) of it, and before I know it, time has passed, I’ve moved on, and the rest of the album remains forever unheard.

Whatever the reason, the result is that like My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth are also left treading water outside my Top 500. You’d think they’d be higher up purely on the strength of Teen Age Riot alone: its laid back mood occasionally interspersed with a furious riff, and a lyric about a world in a dream in which J Mascis is president, is addictive as hell.