Friday, December 27, 2019

it would be easy, but very silly, to nail kim gordon for not making guitar rock, because she was always the least inclined to actually do so. that said, this is certainly a departure from the previous body //head sound, which was at least expected by those familiar with her dominant direction over the syr projects.

with the exception of 'air bnb' and 'hungry baby' (the weakest tracks on the record), i guess she's really just traded in her treated guitars for skittery beats; it's otherwise more or less fundamentally the same thing she's been doing for quite a while, in the sense of producing scattered statements over soundscapes of noise. the change in aesthetic may be jarring, but it's kind of just surface deep.

and, here's the thing: if you found her work with feedback to be a little on the aimless side, the fact that the shift to electronics  is really just aesthetic means that it shouldn't fundamentally alter your perception of what she's doing. if you liked the rambling over atonal guitar noise, you should still like the rambling over glitchy electronic beats; if you didn't, it's hard to see how the shift in sound is going to shift your opinion.

personally, i always liked my kim gordon in smaller doses, and the sonic youth records where she overpowers are, in my opinion, their weakest. i could maybe handle an ep. but the process of removing the other two singers is mostly going to tune me out, and that's just the absolute truth of it.

but, don't let the layers of technology scare you off - there is no fundamental shift in compositional style, here, and your opinion of her solo work should more or less remain static after digesting this.