Great pick from the really early, no wave era of Sonic Youth. The Kill Yr Idols EP came out in October 1983 only in Germany, on Zensor, and that’s Jim Sclavunos on drums on the title track before Bob Bert came back. If you can’t find the EP, the 1995 DGC reissue of Confusion Is Sex tacks its extra tracks on at the end.

Nice to see a Western Canadian band get a write-up here. Going by the release notes, Hanging Tree is the Western-themed one and Compass Points to War is the pirate battle track, so those two look like the fun entry points. Tom Bagley doing the cover art again for the follow-up to Oathbreaker is a nice touch too.

The alt-country tag fits better than you’d think, since Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin came out of The Drones. If the twangier, storytelling side of this clicks for anyone, The Drones’ Gala Mill is well worth going back to. Braindrops is still my favourite TFS record for the sheer chaos of it.

Dragonaut is still one of the best ways into Sleep. Holy Mountain came out in 1992 and that riff sounds just as heavy now. If it clicks, Dopesmoker is the same idea stretched into one hour-long track, and Om, Al Cisneros and Chris Hakius’s later band, takes it somewhere more meditative.

Hard to overstate his reach up here in Norway. Mayhem took their name from Venom’s “Mayhem with Mercy”, and so much of the second wave grew out of Welcome to Hell and Black Metal. If anyone only knows the Black Metal album, Welcome to Hell from '81 is just as raw and worth a listen. Rest easy, Cronos.