Sonic Youth: Confusion Is Sex [GOOFIN]

Why you'll love it

This Goofin' reissue comes with a printed insert. Confusion Is Sex is the first Sonic Youth full-length, recorded on eight tracks with Wharton Tiers, and the one album where Lee Ranaldo plays bass.

This edition

• Printed insert
• Download card included

About the album

Before the feedback symphonies and the big-label years, Sonic Youth were a handful of New Yorkers with detuned guitars, drumsticks wedged under the strings and a head full of ideas. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon met in the downtown scene, recruited Lee Ranaldo after seeing him play with Glenn Branca, and Branca signed them to his Neutral label for their first EP and this, their first album.

Tiers recorded it in the Chelsea basement studio he set up in the building where he worked as superintendent. Jim Sclavunos plays drums on most of it, with Bob Bert back for "Making The Nature Scene" and the Stooges cover, caught live in Raleigh on the band's 1982 tour with Swans. Swans' Michael Gira wrote the words to "The World Looks Red," Ranaldo made "Lee Is Free" at home on two tape recorders, and "Freezer Burn" and "Shaking Hell" are pure, scraping no wave.

Trouser Press reviewed it in 1984, likened it to an aural root canal and said that was just what the doctor ordered. Kim Gordon drew the cover herself, a sketch of Thurston Moore, which is one way to make sure the band portrait gets done on time.

Also at Kops: more Sonic Youth on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Goofin' Records (cat# Goo022), a reissue of the 1983 album.