Sonic Youth: Rather Ripped

2004’s Sonic Nurse album seemed to bring together two often disparate elements in SY’s music - the droning squal of incinerated guitar noise (stemming from Ranaldo and Moore’s time with Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra), and the skewed broken melodic pop of ‘hits’ like ‘Teenage Riot’ and ‘Sunday’ - the latter of which was used as a blueprint for Blur’s ‘Coffee and TV’. The band’s output since 2000’s experimental ‘NYC Ghosts and Flowers’ has been peppered with a tension between the urges to make pop songs on the one hand, and seething soundscapes on the other, often at the expense of cogency. It has also seen some of the most consistently enjoyable music in recent years. Of these urges, Sonic Nurse seemed to present a decent synthesis - edgy and raw, but compact and melodic also, with ten songs of similar length all pointing in a similar direction. The urge towards experimentalism and noise emerged here more softly, adding texture and a density to breezy melodies and riffy hooks, the presence of fifth member Jim O’Rourke bringing a fullness to a sound that had previously been rather bare. It wasn’t both feet in the pop camp by any means, but the dissonance of NYC G&F was severely toned down.
Two years on, the band well into their third decade together, and another album, now without bassist Jim O’Rourke. This time around the pop has definitely wrestled the crown from the noise - and quite straightforward ‘rock’ rears its head on more than one occasion. But this isn’t necessarily a new direction for a band that have been influncing pop acts for the past two decades; the fact that ‘The Neutral’ bares more than a passing resemblance to Sleeper’s ‘Inbetweener’’, and ‘Pink Steam’ could have been written by a more dreamy Placebo only serve as proof of this, rather than criticisms. And the album isn’t really as straightforward as the first two songs would have you believe; the glassy sounds of ‘Do you believe in rapture?’ are more tone poem than rock song. What is perhaps lacking though, is the feeling of looseness and flow that were present on ‘Sonic Nurse’ and on 2002’s excellent ‘Murray Street’. From the opening track ‘Reena’, the sound is tighter and more palpable.
The photo of the band beneath the CD says a lot about the musical content - a posed action shot with guitars and amplifiers - black and white with a New York cityscape behind. It’s clear, visceral and real, four people playing intruments; Sonic Nurse had the band in a gallery, standing in front of Richard Prince’s patchy ‘Nurse’ paintings which also grace the cover. Whatever the intention, the effect is one of simplifying - the emergence of a more straightforward, unpretentious rock band aesthetic. And there’re the obligatory rock band sounds as well; songs that start with clicking 4/4 drum beats over fuzzy feedback, the odd bluesy riff, the occasional chorus. And like Sonic Nurse there’s also an apocalytic Lee Ranaldo number (Rats) and a breathy vocaled Kim Gordan track (Jams Run Free), which left me feeling that the whole thing was a little formulaic - there are also a couple of melodies that are lifted straight from the previous album. Are Sonic Youth growing less creative as they mature and mellow? Perhaps a lack of substance had previouly been shadowed by showy experimentalism and arbtitrary noise. Well, maybe a little.
To focus too much on the failings is unfair though, particularly if we take the album in context. In fact the band continue to release more experimental music on their own label, and this album represents only one side of their output. Also, the fact that this is their fourth album since 2000 is testament to their herculaic prolificacy - one can’t imagine Keane lasting so long, and remaining credible. It also has some moments of quite dazzling beauty; 'Pink Steam' seems to be aiming for the heavens, and the wonderful ‘Incinerate’ is as bouyant a moment of gleeful pop riffing as you’re likely to hear all summer. It’s not in any way perfect, but Sonic Youth albums always feel a bit like works in progress, and that’s something I really enjoy about them.

Thomas Conolly

Further information and full album stream here.