Sonic Youth - A Thousand Leaves

A Thousand Leaves is the band's tenth studio album, but the first to be recorded in their own Manhattan recording studio, allowing all four members a new freedom to experiment with instrumental and vocal styles from psychedelia to poetry, and blunt feminist polemic. Originally released in 1998 it includes the single 'Sunday'.

“...this complex, corrosive album was a transitionary set without which Sonic Youth couldn’t have escaped the Lollapalooza era for the creative freedoms that followed, a statement of independence that was the work of a group unwilling to settle for comfort, when they could strive to be their best selves. ‘Hits Of Sunshine’, jams languidly for over eleven minutes, its pulse slower than a heartbeat, its tendrils of psychedelic guitar purposefully evading focus...the text of the song – at one point mooted as the album’s title track – cites another important reference point: Allen Ginsberg, who had died the previous spring.

But there was a flipside to A Thousand Leaves’ flower-hippy jamming: Kim Gordon’s contributions. And Kim’s work on this album is some of her, well, most Kim Gordon, pushing her blunt, unschooled growl to the forefront, and lining some of the youth’s most combustible noise-bombs with uncompromising, darkly witty politics. “ Stevie Chick, The Quietus

TRACKLIST:

1. contre le sexism

2. sunday

3. female mechanic now on duty

4. wildflower soul

5. hoarfrost

6. french tickler

7. hits of sunshine (for allen ginsberg)

8. karen koltrane

9. the ineffable me

10. snare, girl

11. heather angel

Double LP includes free download coupon