Sonic Youth - Murray Street
(DGC)

Today is a day quite like the first time I heard Sonic Youth. It was the middle of some month, somewhere in some state, and there was a gentle breeze. Someone put some tape in the car stereo, and it was terrible. My life would not change that day.

Right now I am thinking what would happen if today were instead that day and I were to go back and get in that same car. Only instead of Goo, I would listen to Murray Street. Would I take to it more easily? But it is today and not that day. I am 28 and not 17. I am sitting in a house a bank is letting me live in, not in a car outside Ryan's uncle's trailer. How lucky then that Sonic Youth is offering their first classic rock album. Agreeable sounds from radical adults for other adults still clinging to the notion that they could be radical.

Murray Street starts off with Sonic Youth at their most accessible. Copping the bassline to "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Thurston waxes poetic about having nothing to say. This song, like much of the album, is everything you want but nothing you need. It starts the album with a gentle but firm shake from the hand. There's no drama, no extended embrace, just a kind welcome and how-do-you-do.

This hospitality extends into "Disconnection Notice," hiding how topical the song actually is beneath sounds that are warm and digestible. With the band's studio on the actual Murray St., inside the Lower Manhattan debris field, "Disconnection Notice" says how incomprehensible everything suddenly has become. The dichotomy of protection to and from freedom seems unapproachable and numbing. Idealism is easy when you're part of a teenage riot.

When the next song, "Rain on Tin," collapses after its chugging build of neatly interwoven guitars, Sonic Youth seems to be offering up their most conventional and unchallenging album ever. Their ultimate statement in classic rock, I suppose. However things quickly change.

Lee's sole song, "Karen Revisited," is also the album's sole expansive and exploratory statement. Ms. Koltrane of A Thousand Leaves has dropped out of society, but her memory leads to a cloud of guitar noise and the sort of nonlinear jamming that Sonic Youth has been turning into evocative soundscapes since Bad Moon Rising. When the hand drums come in, I am spooked... an amazing song from start to finish.

After the noise clears, the band gets more abrasive. Disposable pop culture is an easy and common target for the band, and "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style" lampoons a music culture where the only statements of rebellion are Fred Durst telling you to yell at your girlfriend and Britney Spears daring to wear belly shirts. Their response to this tragedy of humankind? Noise, of course. Typical Sonic Youth fare with a bit of noise and (relatively subdued) chaos as the song climaxes.

The final two songs show the two sides of Kim Gordon. Amazingly, you've gotten five-sevenths of the way through the album, and Kim has not said or sung a word. Well get ready. "Plastic Sun" is the sort of Free Kitten rant that is so unnerving that, if Kim Gordon really was yr mom, and yr friends were listening to "Plastic Sun," you would say, "No, that isn't my mom." The album's final song, though, features amazing, reserved lyrics and vocals from Coco's mom. Sonic Youth have put you at the bottom of a well and off in the middle of the desert, but in "Sympathy for the Strawberry," the culmination is a childlike run through a field of ripe fruit. The bass and drums are busy and alive, perfectly matching Kim's uptempo delivery of the last stanza.

When reviewing an album like Murray Street, it's important to more or less fuck rationality. I have lived with Sonic Youth in my head for over ten years now. I cannot approach Murray Street's approachability as I did with Goo when I was sitting in that car in that other place in that other time. I have grown up, and Sonic Youth knows this.

Will Murray Street be the first in a line of records where Sonic Youth gives the people what they want? Will I be okay with only being given what I want and not what I really need? Ignore those questions. Murray Street is now. Appreciate now.

jim steed 2002 jul 12