Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 18/12/06
Label: Geffen Records

Hooray! A collection of Sonic Youth b-sides and rarities! Featuring the full 25-minute version of "The Diamond Sea", and just in time for Christmas! Only a real Scrooge, surely, could suggest that this record amounts to a huge waste of time, money, energy and packaging materials. But let's give it a go.

"The Destroyed Room" is a multi-faceted exercise in wrongness. For a start, the whole idea of a Sonic Youth rarities compilation is rather an ambitious one. A great and influential band they may be, but they already put out too many records as it is, and quality control has never been their strong point. Only two of the songs on "The Destroyed Room" are really worth your attention and, incredibly, iTunes won't let you buy either one individually: you have to buy the whole album to get hold of them. From a band as sanctimonious as Sonic Youth, this is a move of breathtaking cynicism and hypocrisy.

The two decent tunes book-end the album. Ten-minute opener "Fire Engine Dream" is a dizzying swirl of guitar effects that crackles with menace; 25-minute closer "The Diamond Sea" is simply a longer version of the monolith with which Sonic Youth would close live sets a decade ago and, though it's entirely superfluous if you've got the 12-minute "Washing Machine" version, there's no denying its quality. As far as the credit column goes, that's it, pretty much.

The debit column is teeming. Tellingly, all the other songs are available to buy individually; they're really best avoided. Track after track in an aimless blur of humming amps, pointless mucking about with effects, dreary jams propelled by meandering guitar interplay, and bleak, endless droning. "Razor Blade" and "Blink" are memorable only for dreadful vocal performances by Kim Gordon. Elsewhere, you're reminded of the major problem that besets the post-hardcore alt-rock scene that so venerates Sonic Youth: namely, the obsession with process over content.

When it comes to the technical aspects of music, Sonic Youth are clearly a gushing font of ideas; what they actually have to say for themselves is often less clear. The sleevenotes of this compilation inform us that "Loop Cat" is the product of Jim O'Rourke "running tracks through various outboard effects": when you hear the results of said studio clownery, the fact that someone deemed them worthy of release boggles the mind. Elsewhere, the miserable "Campfire" is revealed to be a spontaneous composition on a Groovebox synth/sampler sound machine, undertaken at the request of its manufacturer. If someone had recorded a Thurston Moore sneezing fit, would that have made it on here too?

Yet nothing could better encapsulate this compilation's wrongness than the fact that much of it was thrown together so that Japanese versions of their albums could have bonus tracks, meaning fans would buy them again despite already owning import copies. When this band's story is told, "Daydream Nation" will stand as a monument to their talent; "The Destroyed Room" as one to their arrogance.

    by Niall O'Keeffe