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I read SteveOk's post and atsonicpark's post, but regardless:
The album sampler does not offer nearly enough context to judge the music on the album as a whole. Unless a song is pretty much the same all of the way through, hearing 5 to 10 seconds of it will hardly let you know what to expect. If I heard a few seconds of 'Wildflower Soul' from the first minute of the song I'd think it was a snoozer, all the while being obvlivious to the harsh-as-fuck opening and the five minutes or so of pure AWESOME that the mellow beginning opens up to, and I would have unfairly judged one of my favorite Sonic Youth tracks. Furthermore, If I heard a 5 second clip of each song off of 'Sister,' my favorite Sonic Youth album, I can guarantee that my opinion of it would vary greatly depending on where the clips were pulled from (the highlight of a song for me is not the highlight of a song for someone else), and that's assuming that one would even grab the highlight of each song and blow the album's load in such a manner. I assume they just grabbed a few seconds from each song that they thought captured something... not its best moment, but also not a moment that wouldn't convey anything in a few seconds. Ever listen to album samples on Amazon.com? Those clips are much longer and even then they barely give you a feel and can often be misleading. If I had a music editing program on my computer I'd put together such a sampler of some of Sonic Youth's most celebrated albums just to prove the point.
In any case, what the sampler did for me was kill the hype I had built up in my head. All of the weird and crazy expectations I had for the album that I had constructed from my own wildest hopes filtered through tiny bits of information I'd gathered from interviews... all of that was torn down. And that's a fucking good thing. Now I can listen to the album without any baggage going into it.
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