Label: Geffen Format: CD,LP
This album marks yet another, slightly revised, slightly more reflective return in sound for Sonic Youth; all the way back to the rugged melodic scamblings of Daydream Nation. With their amazing capacity for distinction of sound, SY are immediately recognizable from the first stretched note, thoough they seem to have done some house cleaning and root searching for NYC Ghosts & Flowers. New York should be so proud to have this album as a tribute to its grimy real side.
Bastard guitar layers are as liberal as we want the band to give and the songwriting within is masterful power-minimalism at its best. Kim Gordon is in top form with her sarcastic breathy singing and Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo proves themselves poets as much as string-benders as always. Is it a little bit of Lou Reed influence going on inside, or does New York just make them all write that way? Patti Smith too seems to haunt throughout and of course there are the Wm. Burroughs references and sleeve painting which are practically staples. The implicit understanding of New York is such that one might want to don the headphones and take a walk in Hell’s Kitchen, a dark night ride on the subway, and spend an afternoon browsing Grand Central Station, just to really get a hold of the truths of New York expressed through these Ghosts & Flowers.
For those who were weary with the softer, more family versions of the last couple of Sonic years, this album will be most satisfying. Perhaps last year’s heist on SY’s equipment in Los Angeles reminded them of some uglier parts of life, and just as they were when borrowing seemingly every other band on the bill’s guitars at the Oak Canyon Ranch show, immediately post-theft, they are still coming out with that sound, sans custom tweaked instruments and all. One forgets that this quartet has only about 12 years under their belts as they are, a great accomplishment in its own right, what with the revolving door policy of most bands.
Somehow they manage to still give the impression that they know all and have done all; but this was the case from the beginning with their magical combination of personalities, collisions of influences, cooked up in an urban stew to bubble and sprawl . NYC Ghosts & Flowers is well worth the purchase effort, and brings pleasant premonitions about what Sonic Youth may come out with next. They have lost nothing other than the material and as we hear from the evidence presented here, they are perfectly capable of overcoming minor irritations like that.
-Lilly Novak-
