bettin on the POLL in the heather: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star

The terseness and precision of the tracks sound like a Stevensian farewell to an idea: in many ways the most severe SY listen of the early '90s.

Imo this was the big conceptual reset a la Young Americans that made their more conventionally jammy later mode. I feel like a lot of the stuff on MS for example are like what would happen if you took EJSTNS songs & blew them up to about 300% their og length/scope

(*its a bit of erm a stretch but I do think, say Tokyo Eye does kinda map onto Rain on Tin. Same wrt Skink & Sympathy for the Strawberry etc)

(Bone maps out onto SftS, not Skink, duh)

Always have a soft spot for this one, as it was the first "new" SY album I was able to pick-up on release. Obviously I was late to the game already at that point but, hey, I was not yet 18 when it was released and had been in a cultural wasteland before I got away to college. I just thought they were the closest band ever and it was a good time to get really into them - shortly after this came out you had the DGC reissues getting the back catalog in shops, the Made in USA soundtrack, the Confusion is Next book and then Washing Machine hit which, at the time, was my favorite album ever (I even had the blue Washing Machine t-shirt from the cover!).

Never open your album with a slow boring song. They should have ...

i agree with morrisp (it's a perfect opening tune for this album)

Is this the album where he got pissed and almost quit for that reason(?)

no that was Dirty, over "Genetic" being left off the album proper

this has always been my least favourite SY album

I think this is the sy album I've been playing the most often in the last couple of years.

The second SY album I bought upon release (the first was Dirty). In the interim I’d been coping whatever earlier reissues DGC was producing, on tape, because this was when you could still do that

This was the second sonic youth album I bought (after Dirty, though both were bought in 1996 or 1997). I didn't seek it out, I think I just happened to find it used relatively cheap. I remember being a bit disappointed by it compared to Dirty, though I still listened to it a lot since I only had probably between 30 and 40 cds back then. Sonic Youth didn't become a favorite band until I heard "A Thousand Leaves", after which I went back and bought all previous albums.

Slowly over time though, this album has gone up in my estimation, it would probably be a top 5 SY album for me now.