Sonic landscapes. Critics use that term often, but I doubt it will ever lose its metaphorical power and become just another straight-ahead descriptive phrase. I got Yo La Tengo's Painful today, and sonic landscapes are what I keep thinking of. Not the word, mind you--the actual landscapes. "I Heard You Looking" calls up an image of riding down the highway late at night somewhere in the midwest and watching mountains slowly ooze by, while power lines and tiny bushes shoot across the window. "Nowhere Near" is sitting on a porch on a summer night and langorously taking in a view of a forest, smoking and drinking beer, not talking to friends but just being with them. "From a Motel 6" is, god, a burning building, or a forest fire . . . at night. Oh, these songs all take place at night, in case you didn't notice, and have a lot of forests in them. Yo La Tengo would go on to make definite daytime landscapes, like "Tom Courtenay" (total walking down big city streets music midday, checking out antique shops and seeing all the funky architecture, old city like London or certain parts of New York, etc . . . ooo, sonic architecture!) or "Stockholm Syndrome", which exists in the summer in a small park with a lake and a large forest you can escape to if you want. "Superstar Watcher": basement of a poorly heated, dilapidated mansion, with a coughing radiator and voices coming through the ceiling.

Okay, enough pretension for one night. Although, I will say that if there is any connection between Yo La Tengo, The Smashing Pumpkins and U2 (as a label on the WMBC copy of I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One claimed) it is that all three create sonic landscapes, or did at one point (U2 have lost the tendency almost entirely, and the Pumpkins only did it when they wanted to, like "Silverfuck", "1979" or "To Shelia". Well, most of Adore, really. Sidenote: Zwan does not create sonic landscapes. Not even "Endless Summer", an obvious candidate, creates a sonic landscape). I would theorize that sonic landscapes generally have vocals in the background or somehow distorted, or else more a part of the music than the focus of it. Untraditional song structure (rock song structure, anyway) helps. No anthemic moves, no backbeat drums, perhaps less variation of themes (not to say the songs must be the same the whole way through, just that the themes of the various parts of the song must match; no verse-chorus-verse, no rawkin guitar solos, no catchy harmonies popping up and dropping away. Still, repetition seems to help, and adds to a hypnotic effect).

Okay, now enough pretension for one night. Praise Fa.