Rock bands are like movie directors: At any moment, you can do too much or too little and miss the mark. This balancing act is a subtle art; one that can easily be taken for granted. It has to be said that Sonic Youth mastered this balancing act perfectly, always finding just the right tone – even if the individual notes were mostly off-key. Singing? No one here could really do that. But Sonic Youth had a clear vision of what they wanted their music to be. Back then, they were churning out release after release, jumping from song to song at a similar pace to their 1987 concert recording »Hold That Tiger«. Most of them were taken from their great studio album »Sister«.
Nowadays, live albums are a lost art and not much appreciated by young music fans, which is a shame. For Sonic Youth, however, the format works extremely well. It’s incredible how much of their musicianship you can hear, even though the whole thing is so chaotic and noisy. You always get the feeling that the band knows exactly what they’re doing – that may be hard to grasp, but at the heart of the noise on »Hold That Tiger« there are always real songs. They may fall apart, break, and shatter into a thousand pieces, but Sonic Youth are masters at putting those pieces back together, then breaking them again, and so on, without ever getting boring. Never too much, never too little
Hold That Tiger
