3 out of 5

Label: Superior Viaduct

Produced by: Ed Bahlman

As a frequent (nay, obsessive) reader of my reviews, you’ve heard me mention before: that I am an idiot. And some type of musical heathen. I don’t really… like Sonic Youth a ton, or I mean I have never been driven to listen to them beyond my initial “you must listen to this group and own all of their albums” education, which resulted in a quick flurry of Sonic Youth (and related) ephemera being bought, and later sold. When I admit this, and your jaw hangs agape and your heart skips multiple beats, I’ll probably mutter something about ‘acknowledging their impact’ and that their albums are obviously great and yadda yadda but I missed the boat or whatever. This is the same speech I used to have to give about The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, but because so much of what I listen to very much directly ties back to Sonic Youth, that variant of the conversation gets more use.

I’ll probably have to extend that conversation to cover Glenn Branca now, or at least, more specifically, his first full release: The Ascension.

Branca always existed on the peripheral of stuff in my playlist; in the same way you could be cool and take a longer historical view of what led to The Beatles, Branca was part of that longer view for Sonic Youth, and thus a billion other angular noise rock / post-rock / experimental rockers. When I ‘acknowledge the impact’ of some of these landmark bands (and albums), part of what I’m articulating is a bit of “you had to be there”ness. While I’d like to say that you can go to the source inspiration of Your Favorite Band and find some ultimate, new (to you) version of that band, that… doesn’t really make sense. Not that it can’t happen, of course, but Your Favorite Band is a recipe achieved from multiple ingredients, one of which might’ve been Glenn Branca. Sticking very particularly with that metaphor: you might love the meal, even though the individual ingredients aren’t all that appealing. You get where I’m going there.

What’s different, for me, about The Ascension (versus Sonic Youth), is that I actually do really like this ingredient. This is a good album. This is something I will listen to. …But less than later Branca, when he would take his concepts and evolve on them. Because this is his brain – experimenting with sound – in a bare form, when the focus is the idea somewhat over the music. (Though, thankfully, it kind of balanced out so that the music is pretty good too.)

The Ascension’s is about noise: take different guitar strings, tune them to the same note, and play that shit loud, which obviously means recruiting four guitarists. The album’s ultimate dedication to this is on its concluding title track, which slowly builds to layers and layers of those guitars (and a bassist and drummer), making for a delightful cacophony that, as mentioned, Branca would work to expand on on future releases (somewhat literally, like adding 96 more guitars). But here, in the pursuit of an idea, Glenn recorded each track inbetween shows for his preceding EP, Lesson No. 1 – the kind of rollicking, repetitive nature of which appears on Ascension’s other tracks – meaning the album has this half-inspired, half-distracted vibe where the sound is pretty raw, and vital, but not quite achieving something conclusive. It is the starting shape.

Now, had I been listening to this in 1981, my mind probably could have been properly blown. Nowadays, Polar Goldie Cats set my standard for minimalist guitar rock; groups like Pelt or 5ive or Chevreuil fill out artier or louder or now-wavier aspects of volume-driven stuff; and my indie rock explorations started with Thinking Fellers, or U.S. Maple, who can trace some of their wanderings or broken composition style back here in some for or another. The Ascension is very streamlined in comparison to a lot of works from these artists. But, as I’ve been yammering on about: I think Branca kept moving forward from here, which means this album has value not only as one of those Sonic Youth-y musical landmarks, but more narrowly focusing on Glenn’s career, as a sign of when he was figuring out how he wanted to juggle art versus music in his works.

The Ascension is five tracks of instrumental guitar post-rock. Sonic Youth fans will dig on its angularism on half of its tracks; Godspeed! fans will dig on its slow builds to volume overloads. By modern standards, it’s probably not mind-blowing, but considering it predates every single band I’ve mentioned, it’s at least worth acknowledging its impact… but this time I’ll be saying that while extolling Branca’s catalog, with The Ascension as a necessary jumping off point.