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Feb 12, 2024Walls Have Ears is certainly less valedictory than Live in Brooklyn 2011. Yet, by virtue of this, it gives a stronger sense of how Sonic Youth earned their unimpeachable credentials through a long-standing ethos of contravention that unsettled musical and artistic complacencies of the time.
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Feb 12, 2024Despite its thorny history, this is an exhilarating portrait of the band's shift from their no wave beginnings to the more complex and melodic style that defined their later work.
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The WireMar 20, 2024Walls Have Ears is a postcard from Sonic Youth in their salad days, with newly recruited drummer Steve Shelley cementing a core line-up that would endure until disbandment 26 years later. [Apr 2024, p.75]
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MojoFeb 21, 2024Walls is an essential slice of art-punk history. It's also a blistering good time. [Apr 2024, p.97]
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Feb 15, 2024Sonic Youth is criminally underrated and fans of adventurous, guitar-driven rock will find tons to like from their wide-ranging, rich career. Walls Have Ears is just an early drop in the sonic bucket.
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Feb 12, 2024Unlike their first and, let's be honest, irritatingly indulgent live recording, Sonic Death, Walls Have Ears presents Sonic Youth as resourceful, patient and secure in their esoteric songcraft.
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Feb 14, 2024For all its audible stitched-togetherness, there’s value in hearing the entrails of Sonic Youth’s anarcho-apparatus spark into place, one by one.
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Feb 12, 2024Each performance is lucid and brutal, rattling audiences with its unstoppable fervor. Sometimes it’s hard to envision this adolescent version of Sonic Youth while knowing what’s to come for them, but it makes for an all the more enthralling listen as we imagine how it must have felt to be on the precipice of greatness.