Sonic Youth - Washing Machine

Geffen

Sonic Youth's ninth studio album Washing Machine, in my calculation, is Sonic Youth's dingiest affair. There's a weight to this collection of tracks, like someone's been visited by many a sleep paralysis demon. Consciousness has soaked-up the city smog; any and all output now smeared by seedy, underbelly contemplation. The tracks are less "singy-songy" - whatever that means in relation to the spheres of Sonic Youth, more open-ended, I guess - quite vast and more structurally free. 

Grim reality. Rough sleepers. Spoilt milk. Sewers on the rise. Streets on the decline. Cities on cinderblocks. Minds held in molasses states. Groggy - slow to think, slow to act, slow to live. Life has taken on a pretty sharp edge - head hitting the limiter; feelings hitting rock bottom. A dull drudgery pervades thereafter; an inescapable greyscale. A lack of life inbetween scenes. A rush of blood to the dead. Forever skirting around the edge. Highways lead to nowhere; nowhere leads to the low-ways. The functioning fall of it all. Breathe it out, and let it in. Time cracked in two. Split. Timelines shift in realtime. Every move made felt on a universal scale - a scale out of balance and forever out of your favour. 

Psychedelics sealed with sinister lips. Sour buzz. $100 used to be more than enough. Blood crystallized to sand. Slipping around the bottom edge. Real good feedback and super-sounding riffs. Hello 2015. Hello 20....15. The future is now upon us, as it always is. Living on the edge alludes to a future-NOW way of being. Spiritually present, functionally futured. The pushing and pulling of energy. The search for deeper meaning. The want to feel worthy. The need for somewhere to call home. 

"The Diamond Sea" is delicate-turned-ugly turned-daydreamy-dissonant-turned diamond-encrusted lunacy. The diamond sea awaits us all. Fall into it. Get cut-up by its ugly beauty. Slit your wrists on its essence and feel the edge: of now, of tomorrow, of forever. 

Time takes it's crazy toll, mirror falling off the wall.