Sister Tracklist
Sister is the fourth full length studio album by Sonic Youth, released in June 1987 on the independent record label, SST Records. Sister was recorded on a 16 track between on analogue tubes between March and April, 1987 in Manhattan. According to guitarist Lee Ranaldo, the recording process for Sister was unlike any way the band had previously worked. In the “Sister” Interview Disc, Ranaldo said that the band:
[…] Didn’t get a sound in any way that approximated what we do live, and we feel this record is a lot closer to that… This is the first album we all played together live for the basic tracks since Confusion…
Most of Sister was written while the band toured in support of their previous album, EVOL. According to Sonic Youth historian David Browne in his biography of the band, Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth, Sister is a loose concept album that reflected sci-fi author Philip K. Dick’s life and writings, and was even titled after Dick’s fraternal twin sister who died shortly after her birth. According to the Sonic Youth archives, the working titles for Sister were either going to be Kitty Magic, Humpy Pumpy or Sol-Fuc. The opening track, “Schizophrenia” was originally titled “Sister”, and during live shows, front-man Thurston Moore would often introduce the song in that manner.
Musically, Sister was more of a shift in sound, as the band strayed away from the no-wave scene and entered a more traditional, yet still experimental phase, which would peak while creating Daydream Nation. Thurston Moore spoke in the same aforementioned interview:
It still doesn’t sound perfect… [Sister] should be a document of the songs as the songs are played to their fullest.
Kim Gordon spoke on the matter as well, saying there was a notable shift in sound compared to their previous works:
All the records have been like that. Confusion, all those songs are all really slow. Kill Yr. those are slow.
For the promotion of Sister, Sonic Youth would produce a variety of music videos for the tracks “Beauty Lies in the Eye” and “Stereo Sanctity”. However, like their previous efforts, Sister went largely under the radar, and was considered an unsuccessful release. Since then, the album has received universal praise from both listeners and critics, many of whom citing it as one of the best albums of the 1980s.
“Sister” Q&A
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What has the media said about the album?
NPR ranked the record as the #127 greatest album made by a female artist, saying:
Kim Gordon’s persona in Sonic Youth was dry, distant, deadpan and centered around ideas of elective inaccessibility. Yet she recognized the very real of the power of embracing sexuality on stage and off, and that those ideas weren’t solely reserved for the assumed polarity of art school and pop music. Regardless of her talent and fearless performance approach, Gordon is often written off as merely adjacent to her ex-husband and former bandmate Thurston Moore. But it’s Gordon’s genius that ultimately made the band’s 1987 album Sister – its first foray into melodicism, into indie rock territory — successful, with its characteristic atonal noise never fully removed. On Sister, ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye’ exuded a goth-y psychedelia, while ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ mirrored the beautiful and winding road of its namesake without the California lightheartedness. In ‘Cotton Crown,’ Gordon and Moore harmonized with mournful precision, a rarity in Sonic Youth’s droning discography and the closest thing to a romantic gesture from the band (before it gets into love song territory, it unravels into a joke). If Sister signified Sonic Youth’s inching towards convention, Gordon’s presence placed a crucial boundary on its version of rock and roll. Here she confirmed that musical eclecticism works thematically, through a combination of force, aggression, humor and experimentation.
