Sonic Youth

Screaming Fields of Sonic Love captures many of Sonic Youth's better songs from their indie era in the '80s. While it's doubtful the group would have ever come close to getting airplay on MTV during this era with the group's edgy status as rebellious underground rockers playing noisy and highly inaccessible music, the videos themselves obviously didn't help the situation. The videos for "Shadow of a Doubt" and "MacBeth" are low-budget montage segments characterized primarily by hallucinatory shots of strange views that toy with clarity and color. Much like the group's music, nothing seems clear in these videos. Rarely does the camera slowly track, pan, or sit still. Instead, one cut follows the next, resulting in a maze-like montage of shots that allude to vague and disturbing ideas. The best two examples of this phenomenon -- "Death Valley '69" and "Teenage Riot" -- move from shot to shot quickly, juxtaposing muddy images of the band members with other seemingly nonrelated images. Infamous photographer Richard Kern's "Death Valley '69" dodges back and forth between a near plot-like structure involving the band's murder and a strange woman going psycho with a knife. Sonic Youth's self-produced video for "Teenage Riot" takes a different approach, quickly splicing images of the band with images of other seminal underground rock icons such as Patti Smith and Henry Rollins. Along with these videos are some bootleg-quality recordings of the band performing live. The band's rambunctious performance, in all of its guitar feedback glory, of "Silver Rocket" on a late-night talk show and a performance of the group performing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" live with Iggy Pop will delight any Sonic Youth fan. ~ Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide