The progress of humanity in the 20th century was astounding. Scientific discoveries laid the way for advances in technology which has improved the quality of life throughout the world. The power of technology was harnessed to move the focus of the arts away from painting with a brush towards novel media. Where once music was mostly bought in the form of score music, for the family to perform around the piano, it became mass produced and mass consumed.
 
In art, technology has to have heart. There is no point using it for the sake of using it. It became clear that higher and higher quality photographs could not compete artistically with images produced by a paintbrush. Similarly, although recorded music became higher and higher quality, it didn’t become any more fun to listen to. Can anyone really hear the difference between 320 kbps mp3s and a FLAC file?

Ariel Pink and his chill-dren (copyright Simon Reynolds) popularised the idea in the 2000s that perhaps something had been lost in the endless pursuit of higher and higher quality sounds at the turn of the millennium, when competing formats Super Audio CD and DVD Audio fought it out, yet failed to capture the imagination of anyone. The idea that expending greater amounts of memory for a greater number on the bitrate quality of music will necessarily provide a better experience has been thoroughly disparaged.

It’s not always possible to say which instrument is being played on ‘Psycho-Sonic’, a compendium of singles released by 60s rockers the Sonics. But it’s not about listening to which instrument is which. When I listen to this racket, I hear musicians playing and a vibe being conveyed.  When contemporary rock bands forgo modern digital tools in favour of 1960s analogue equipment, this is the sound they want to capture. It is raw, raucous and unpolished. The Sonics complain that they never satisfactorily converted their live sound into a recording which did it justice. If that is indeed the case, then they must have been sensational.

The compilation is accompanied by a thick booklet detailing the history of the Sonics, including their forebears and an interview with their official photograph. It serves as a comprehensive introduction to the group and their tracks. Covers of standards of the time like ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ are unsubtle and energising; they don’t sacrifice the momentum of the rest of the compilation in order to sound closer to the originals, they maintain the Sonics’ aesthetic of sonic overload. It’s no surprise that ‘The Witch’ has been covered by the Horrors, it its title and sound quite neatly fits the gothic angst of their first album.  If the NME’s ‘New Rock Revolution’ of The Strokes, The Hives and all the other ‘The’ bands caught you by surprise, and you wondered just where that sound came from, now you know.