Assembling a "non-album" collection can be tricky. It requires songs interesting enough to be worth hearing, yet not so interesting that you wonder why they were ever discarded. It's even trickier with a group like Sonic Youth, who've created so many outlets for their unofficial adventures-- solo records, collaborations, the self-released SYR series-- that a disc of leftovers seems redundant. Maybe that's why the band went 25 years without releasing one.
Despite that inexperience, The Destroyed Room plays the role of non-album well. Each track offers something worthwhile, yet none raises any question as to why it ended up here. That's no surprise, as these four have always judged their own material smartly. Most of their spirited also-rans-- from early toss-offs like the grimy "You Pose You Lose" and the pseudo-rap "Master Dik" to loose covers of Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" and the New York Dolls' "Personality Crisis"-- have worked best as a stand-alone novelties.
What is surprising is the record's variety. The phrase "Sonic Youth outtake" immediately conjures an instrumental jam-- a nascent idea that might eventually hatch a full song, like the sketches on SYR2 that became tracks on A Thousand Leaves. About half of this album falls into that category, but there are also squiggly electronics, low-key folk, and rough blues-- styles that have rarely emerged on previous SY-related releases.
The best of these anomalies is "Blink", a slow séance that initially sounds like a campfire version of EVOL's "Shadow of a Doubt". But repeated listens reveal something unique, as Kim Gordon's sleepwalking intonations ("I can see/ My body move/ It goes without me") float through looping hand drums, rubbery bass, and spikes of guitar. Such stoic restraint might have trouble fitting on a proper Sonic Youth album, but it's compelling as an isolated experiment.
Nearly as interesting are two electronic-based pieces. "Campfire", a 1999 piece spontaneously composed on a Groovebox sampler, builds a static field of radio waves and synth washes, like an Excepter backing track waiting for John Fell Ryan to drool over it. "Loop Cat" comes from the Murray Street days, when the notoriously sleep-averse Jim O'Rourke would often toy endlessly with raw recordings. Here, he molds sparse guitar lines into whirring ambience and springy reverb, morphing the band's basic elements into inverse shapes.
The Destroyed Room's more conventional jams are a mixed bag. The opening 10-minute "Fire Engine Dream" outlasts its own inspiration, and the scrawny "Fauxhemians" never quite catches fire, but the rest are intriguing essays. "Kim's Chords", a bonus cut from the Japanese edition of Sonic Nurse, updates the throb of one of NYC Ghosts and Flowers' best tracks, "Never Mind (What Was It Anyway)". Later, "Beautiful Plateau" and "Queen Anne Chair" offer the kind of rising structures and dreamy guitar noise that remind you that without Sonic Youth, inspired feedback wranglers from My Bloody Valentine to Fennesz might still be seeking influences.
Only once does the most predictable kind of outtake-- the alternate version of an album track-- emerge here, in a 26-minute expansion of "The Diamond Sea" from Washing Machine. Like a soft-rock version of *EVOL'*s "Xpressway to Yr Skull", it takes a simple melody and appends long trails of noise and reverb. This might have worked better on the album it was crafted for, adding fire to what felt tepid as an edited single. Maybe one day we'll get a deluxe Washing Machine that includes this superior rendering, but until then, count it as another worthy curiosity on a collection of welcome orphans.
