silence kit #7

Sonic Youth
NYC Ghost & Flowers [Geffen, 2000]
Murray Street [Geffen, 2002]
Sonic Nurse [Geffen, 2004]

“Smiling beatific roommates, from dust to dust they create rock n roll”, so to quote Thurston Moore’s lyrics on “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style” from one of these three albums (Murray Street, actually) that have been invariably referred to as the New York trilogy. The song, with its evocation of art-noise anxiety and puerile punk exhortations, is also as good an anthem (or elderly statesmen statement) as any for Sonic Youth to break cover on another extraordinary cycle of their long, near-mythical record-making career, the band poised as ever in laying down the gauntlet for younger musicians.

For better or for worse, these three albums also happen to be the ones instantaneously associated with the time Jim O’Rourke clocked in with the band. And for all the believable rhetoric crediting the Chicago musician/producer’s brief stint with revitalizing the four original band members (unnecessarily in my view unless you can pinpoint to me the parts on which O’Rourke made crucial contribution to their sound or makeup – I can’t), one should also be mindful that Sonic Youth very seldom lacked in terms of musical vocabulary.

But let’s begin by kicking this shit back to 2000. In retrospect, the much maligned NYC Ghost & Flowers seems to hold up a bit better today than when it was first released but taken as a whole, the album while nice enough doesn’t quite measure up to the other two showpieces in the trilogy. The Thurston Moore pieces, “Free City Rhymes” and “Small Flowers Crack Concrete” specifically, deftly match bohemian beat poetry to impressionistic melodic hazes, while Lee Ranaldo’s frighteningly good title track composition builds beautifully from Lee’s wintry wails of echo-canyon soundscaping into its final two minutes of shattering chaos. Elsewhere the music was less impressive – for all the rickety guitar jams on the record, it felt like the band was interested only in providing clues t0 the small secret currents stacked in NYC Ghost & Flowers.
Moore himself had described these records as “spirit-like, architectural, and humanitarian”, and the subsequent Murray Street and Sonic Nurse, especially when taken together, do much justification to this interpretation. Where the broad palette of futuristic free forms of NYC Ghost & Flowers is delivered in a disjointed fashion rather on purpose, the more focused Murray Street mined the band’s newfound subtleties from micro perspectives, resulting in streams of lilting guitars wizened with rocky ruminations.

Either mewling in songs like “Karen Revisited” and “Sympathy For The Strawberry” that stretch with ease from spells of soft hidden energies to controlled feedback abuse within their ten-minute frames or running through short spurts of punk menace (“Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style”; Kim Gordon’s terrific “Plastic Sun”), the songs on Murray Street flicker by like mysterious montage visions of cross-country kinetics. Released post-911 and the album title perhaps a slight reference to the passenger plane engine that crashed right onto Murray Street, I can only speculate that the devastated landscape affected the course and urgency of the album osmotically.

Cut-rate surrealism is again the prescriptive order on Sonic Nurse, which probably features the most diverse spread of sounds, styles and influences. William Gibson on “Pattern Recognition”. The subdued chiming on “I Love You Golden Blue” tapping into the atmospheric rock tuning that is then the emblem of emerging experimental bands like Animal Collective and Black Dice. The snare of loose-limbed improvisations on “Dripping Dream” echoing free jazz. The languid “Peace Attack” reaffirming their slight interest in the spiritual regeneration mode first hinted on 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Remarkably the manifold sound and fury comes together seamlessly on Sonic Nurse, at the same time giving the sense that the songs had or followed a certain logic only Sonic Youth are privy to. And not a bad way to cap off a trilogy indeed, before 2007’s Rather Ripped (an excellent album too, and their final release on Geffen) rock-ferried the band back to more familiar grounds.