*IN RETROSPECT* CICCONE YOUTH

SONIC YOUTH (AS CICCONE YOUTH)
THE WHITEY ALBUM

Some premier indie acts have been known to go on artistic detours, to the disdain of fans sometimes are waiting for the next "proper" release from them.

In recent times, Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, had a flurry of activity with side projects like Volcano Choir amongst a few others, in between major Bon Iver releases. Yo La Tengo's pet project Condo Fucks, the Wilco alumni involved in the band Loose Fur.

While these excursions are sometimes helpful in keeping a musician focused and well rounded, not letting the music they're playing to become boring, it gets channeled into lower profile guest appearances or collaborations on other bands albums.  Some of which the results are incredibly mixed.

If you are the kind of person who will look at your favourite band through rose coloured glasses, you will most certainly eat up anything they are associated with, you'll buy everything they release regardless of the content or quality.

Sonic Youth were among them, I don't  think these forays into different projects detract from their long-standing musical credibility, but what it does do, is endear you to them. They just really didn't care at all during their reign as possibly the greatest indie group rock that ever was (is) whatever..

I mean it can be argued that when they left SST and went to Geffen records, their own sound was watered down, but I think a lot of things happening in their music leading up to releases like GOO and Dirty, were precursors to the sounds of those albums.

They never seemed to lose their integrity throughout all the different phases of their career. In fact one way they knew they could fly under the radar musically with their avant-garde experiments, was to release them under different pseudonyms like their "difficult listening series" known in volumes as SYR, that was how Ciccone Youth was born.

A made up group comprising of Sonic Youth and Mike Watt from the minutemen, solely for the purpose of recording this album. The concept stems from an EP SY put out called Master=Dik. The first use of programmed drums in anything Sonic Youth related was a curiosity and at the time probably wasn't expected to be fleshed out into an entire full length project.

But that's exactly what they did, they also took inspiration from the most unlikely of sources, Madonna.

As we see a magnified photo of Madonna as the album cover, we are really none the wiser as to the music on this thing. Madonna had given her approval of the art work to be released, and who knows maybe she has a copy of this at home, it does after all contain covers of a few of her hit tracks like "Burnin' Up" and "Into The Groove".

All throughout we basically have a Sonic Youth record except with the addition of Mike Watt, drum machines and synthesisers. The guitars are still quintessentially Thurston and Lee, the occasional cool  Kim Gordon crooning appears a few times. We also have some nice instrumental tracks that border on industrial no wave (which goes back to their origins as a group).

The Whitey Album comes together like an pop art counterculture pastiche, with the two worlds of pop music and the fringe music of Sonic Youth colliding in a gloriously chaotic marriage of sound.

There are a couple of tracks with spoken word segments, and they remind me of some of the "concrete musique" elements of the Swans LP "Soundtracks of the blind". 

Sonic Youth reissued The Whitey Album in 2006, after being out of print for about ten years through their GOOFIN records imprint. It is definitely worth checking out if you are a Sonic Youth fan. If you're looking to get into them, I would probably suggest Daydream Nation or any of the post SST albums, as this one will be for the die-hards.

There's not much to make of it, it's not an unheralded gem in the Sonic Youth discography, an understood masterpiece. It's just a wacky curiosity, something they cooked up and had a good time with. It showed that Sonic Youth weren't just another pretentious art-rock group from New York.

Callan Cummings