Review Summary: SYR2: Slaapkamers Met Slagroom is a noisy one, but nothing that any fan of the band shouldn’t be able to handle and enjoy.
The closer you look at the cover of Sonic Youth's second independently released EP, Slaapkamers Met Slagroom, the bigger of a headache you will get. The album art is much like the first two and the fourth EP, picking a color and a design theme, all with dizzyingly, and almost nauseatingly, detailed yet rather microscopic deliverance.
The album art acts rather as an opposite for the EP. The band's sound here is as big as it ever was, but it's deliverance is just more subtle. Since there are only three songs, the band have jammed as much into them as they can, especially the opening and title song. The seventeen-minute epic of an opening, the title track "Slaapkamers Met Slagroom", starts of like a demented Ferris wheel, tuneful yet hauntingly vague. The band breaks into an epic build of a jam off of three simple, yet gruesomely delicious, notes being strummed, and quickly build into an epic noise battle between the band members, letting the music fuzz up like antennas picking up signals, until the song bursts into a different direction, with faster pace, more focused band members and performances, and another frankly epic build to another sea of noise, as wonderful, confusing and chaotic as the last.
Where Slaapkamers leaves off, it's up to the final two tracks, the seven minute hummer "Stil", which breaks off from the noise of Slaapkamers to create a more chaotically melodic yet somewhat ambient piece, acting as a neutral zone inbetween the epic first song the low key last one. It's Sonic Youth at their jammiest, and the result is basically what you'd expect; it's bewildering, but somehow it's fascinating and equally as enjoyable. "Herinneringen" is basically the finale, with the quiet playing of a guitar and Kim's rhythmical talking/singing gently seeping over, which helps create the tiny but powerful soundscape that the EP deserves to be signalled off with.
SYR2: Slaapkamers Met Slagroom is a noisy one, but nothing that any fan of the band shouldn’t be able to handle and enjoy. But this is definitely a fans-only release; all interested in the band should check into their three essential albums. But for fans, it's quirky, it's mind-bending, and it's noisy, but it'll definitely put a smile on your face. After all, the wonderful title track is about as Sonic Youth as it gets, and it rarely gets better.
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