Walls Have Ears

If Manhattan’s misunderstood muck could talk—think smashed-up cigs, boot-trodden gum splotches, the strange liquid that oozes from certain subway stations—its voice would sound a lot like early-career Sonic Youth. Long before their weaponized tinnitus would take their music, and their tour van, across the globe, they occupied a derelict yet fertile corner of New York, where dissatisfied art types recognized the squalor of their city, processed it through shitty speakers, and threw it back in its face. This was a nascent, no-holds-barred iteration of post-punk, marked by left-field song structures, unforgiving decibel levels, and, in extreme cases, bloodied strumming hands. “I maintain that/Chaos is the future/And beyond it is freedom,” Thurston Moore deadpans in “Confusion Is Next,” from 1983’s Confusion Is Sex. To extract catharsis from chaos, you must first spend time at chaos’s altar.

On paper, Moore’s declaration sounds vague, like the sort of thing a young eccentric might scribble in protest of detention. But it was also pretty prophetic: Spearheaded by Sonic Youth, indie rock’s next decade would seek strange beauty in the bizarre—tongue-talking pedalboards, battered whammy bars, feedback that foamed at the mouth. Pulled from three 1985 UK shows, Walls Have Ears pinpoints the band between sputtering sound system and well-oiled noise machine, soon to transcend fringe credibility for alt-rock titanhood. The record existed for decades as a coveted bootleg, originally issued without permission by Paul Smith, an early arbiter of their European releases. Thirty-eight years later, it still sounds like a smuggled good. The mixing is stuffy, low quality, borderline claustrophobic. It’s hard to listen without feeling, ever so faintly, like the walls are closing in, damning you to suffocation in a shaking hell. You can’t hide from the monster—and yet, for some reason, you don’t really want to.

The collection offers a ragtag crash course in Sonic Youth’s first three records, interspersed with occasional cameos from the then-unreleased Evol. On raucous renditions of “Death Valley ’69” and “Kill Yr. Idols,” Steve Shelley’s drumming—at that point, a fresh addition to Sonic Youth’s apparatus—is enchanted and animalistic, a hungrier, more depraved engine behind tracks that already seemed murderous enough. “Brother James,” in particular, makes the version that appears on Confusion Is Sex sound pedestrian, maybe even polite. Kim Gordon wants to usher you “straight to hell”; Shelley’s thumps are the feet of the devil, dancing with glee at the sight of fresh meat. For all its audible stitched-togetherness, there’s value in hearing the entrails of Sonic Youth’s anarcho-apparatus spark into place, one by one. Midway through “Kill Yr. Idols,” when Moore hollers “Confusion is seeeeeeeex,” letting the “sex” hang just long enough for you to think about it, the naked guitar registers, uncannily, like the rasping throat of a ghoul. When Shelley and Gordon return to fill in the empty space, it’s one of those moments where you feel like the room is shrinking, an inch every beat.

The record’s second half pulls from an April pre-Shelley gig, one of their last with early drummer Bob Bert. There’s volcanic musicianship here, as is true of the Shelley shows, but there’s also more of the in-between stuff—like the minutes-long fuzz-guitar murmuring that precedes “Ghost Bitch,” or the tentative input-jack bursts that eventually fester into a second “Brother James” rendition. They weren’t the types to say it themselves, but Sonic Youth were hungry to be respected, hungry to have their dissonant catharsis understood by outsiders to the city that produced it. By the mid ’80s, much to their annoyance, writers had been making cheap comparisons to the Jesus and Mary Chain, another upstart quartet that drew more acclaim, faster. Between “Ghost Bitch” and “Death Valley ’69,” while the group audibly readies guitars, a JAMC cassette can be heard playing, sped up to the point of cartoonish oblivion. They aren’t doing any talking, but you get the sentiment.

Walls Have Ears is rife with an endearing patched-together air, the splotchy varnish of a band established enough to gig overseas, but not quite ready to afford guitar techs. They had a chaotic gospel to spread, and they were hellbent on spreading it—regardless of where, to whom, and to what effect. Sonic Youth were often desperate, it seemed, to prove that the filthy was even filthier than you imagined: Your America was their wicked warzone, your Manhattan their squalid sublunary. With the grittiest versions of their grittiest songs, it’s hard to deny that even at their best, they were brash, harsh, and confusing. They’d probably take each of those as compliments.

Sonic Youth: Walls Have Ears

$30 at Rough Trade