SONIC YOUTH "Sonic Nurse" podwójny LP

The last eight years or so have been tense times for fans of Sonic Youth. They have taken sometimes confusing paths since their watermark release, Dirty, and have since invited a sense of apprehension through albums such as A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts & Flowers. Murray Street saw a serious return to form, but was haunted by an overwhelming sense of dislocation. It was as if the New York City Ghosts and Flowers had found their voice, but not their body. Sonic Nurse does not suffer the same symptoms, and is easily Sonic Youth’s best album in a decade.

This does not mean that long-time fans should expect to be blown away – if you know their back catalogue, there will be no real surprises or epiphanies here. Sonic Youth are instantly identifiable, and I think this is an expectation that a lot of fans hope will be shattered – perhaps using proto-techno obscurities such as Macbeth (Ciccone Youth) and She Is Not Alone (the fractured tape-fuck version included on Sonic Death) as starting points. This will probably never happen, at least not outside of the members’ numerous side projects.

What this album is, though, is a forced awakening from the cosy fantasy of late 90′s, Clinton-era optimism (can anyone remember what it feels like not to worry?) into the occupied body of a world consumed by fear, paranoia and falsity. And in that context, as a storming of the psychic Bastille, this album is a formidable flexing of the Sonic Muscle. Not that Sonic Nurse even comes close to the political involvement of, say, Dirty – but there is some real sinew in songs such as Stones, New Hampshire, Paper Cup Exit, Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Handcream, and Pattern Recognition.

And for the first time in ages, Sonic Youth open an album with pace. Pattern Recognition is dangerously assured, Kim Gordon’s agitated rasp a collection of threatening embers riding the barely restrained glow of guitars – which switch restlessly between irreverent melodicism and descending sheets of noise. It encompasses so many aspects of their most classic sounds in its six and a half minutes, that by the time they manage to subdue the fuzzed-up dissonance they’ve aroused from their instruments – and this effort occupies the last 60 seconds of the song – the album could end right there with a degree of satisfaction … a degree of promise, anyway.

Unmade Bed slows it down with an addition to Thurston’s growing catalogue of ballads, this one a melodic meditation on a man who is “like an unmade bed“:

    Look who’s come back home againLoser looking for his lucky break

    This time he says he just needs a friend

    Ain’t on the run, he ain’t on the take

It is one of the few laid-back tracks on the album, but has enough shifting textures and subtlety to sustain interest.

The relative placidity doesn’t last, though, as The Dripping Dream is announced with a muted broadcast of twisted noise and feedback from Lee. As soon as Steve Shelley’s toms kick in, bouncing beneath Thurston’s colourful arpeggio, Lee’s guitar bursts with articulation and positively soars. It is one of the most tightly-targeted, brilliantly rendered and joyous attacks of feedback ever put to record. If only the US Armed Forces had weapons this accurate. But the pyrotechnics don’t distract at all from the song’s ecstatic lyricism, celebrating “cream-dream wax“, “taxed-out confusion and joy“, and “sensations shaking us from sleep“.

From here, things heat up even more with a scathing slap at celebrity in Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Handcream (they had to change the title, replacing Mariah Carey with Kim Gordon). With jarring guitars straight from some of Dirty’s more abrasive moments, Kim Gordon goes directly for the throat

    Your bounce in the ounce/ Makes us wanna pounce/ You’re just being totally perfect/ ‘I’m Mary K’ you said, you were tired/ time you went to bed/ Hey, hey little baby – breakdown

What’s strange about these latter-day offerings from Sonic Youth is the clarity of production. Gone are the mysterious magnetic forces that made their earlier releases sound as though they were recorded in an outer chamber of Hell, to be gradually replaced by diamond-cut spacings and digital crispness. If a new Sonic Youth sound is emerging, it probably involves progressions such as this, and it particularly helps tunes such as Stones and New Hampshire, two Thurston fronted numbers that feature some psychotic guitar duels and the most condensed, tightly targeted rock riffing from the Youth in ages. Stones reminds me of an 80′s B-grade movie soundtrack – there is an ominous dread in the swinging sing-song of the verses and their Living Dead imagery. Very EVOL.

But most power in the compositions stem from their sophistication in layering sounds; in the subtle additions and subtractions; in the way they aurally manipulate your responses, your lines of thought, with supreme ease. You always know where you are, but never how you got there, or where you might be going next. Describing the album on their website, the band ask listeners to ‘imagine Bare Trees era Fleetwood Mac jamming with Jealous Again era Black Flag.’ I guess this is confusing enough to accurately evoke some of the deceptively wierd places that songs such as Dripping Dreams and Dude Ranch Nurse go.

You could probably keep that reference in mind with I Love You Golden Blue, which floats Kim’s haunted vocals through an autumnal guitarscape similar to that of Bad Moon Rising‘s Hallowe’en. The intro – which is probably the most obvious contribution on the whole album from Jim O’Rourke – sets up an appropriately surreal answering machine for the dead, on which Kim leaves disturbingly hushed messages:

    Dead boy stares, strange to meet you.Dead boy cares, so great to see him

Throughout the album, Steve Shelley’s drums are such an evocative constant that they add a kind of narrative structure to songs that quite often blur their own boundaries of containment. Listening to Sonic Youth without Steve Shelley on drums would be a bit like watching Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive without David Lynch directing – irretrievably confusing. His ability to rationalise disparate elements of the music is a large factor in the power of the album’s highlight song, which is Lee Renaldo’s towering Paper Cup Exit.

What starts as a few bars of Hawaian daydream is broken by a sudden propulsion:

    Skimming the tops of tall treesThrought the clear light of free speech

On reflection, it seems a highly complex composition, but it all unfolds with the cool perfection and articulated poise of Fonzi kneeing a jukebox in the sweetspot at Arnold’s. Lee’s voice climbs and climbs a strangled, mewling chord, before breaking into Ginsberg-like clarity over a cleaned and broken rhythm:

    Memory diseaseacross United States that I

    had told the truth. Feel so high,

    architectural. I look to the sky

    I see our bodies – They were rising up,

    out of a paper cup.

His poetic images cast a vivid and passionate portrait of the modern American psyche. It’s funny – Lee is easily the band’s best singer and lyricist, but he only ever gets to contribute one song per album. It would be interesting to see the effects of a more equal division.

By the end of the album, you sort of wonder where the massive fisty-fuck to George Bush and his crew is. Sure, there are references to “heat-seeking missile freaks“, to alleys of the mind where “the dead are alive“, and there are shouts of “don’t wanna be a slave!” but you’d sort of expect at least a brief Youth Against Fascism tantrum. What comes is the unexpectedly pacific Peace Attack. Thankfully, it pretty much does what they say they want it to do. Which is “gay marriage the hell out of religious zealot war pigs Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Ashcroft”.

It rises out of its shell with all the gentle, unrelenting force of Gaia encompassing all the petty hates of men within the crushing forgiveness of her thighs. It is a promising end to the album, and ends it as a promise.

    Springtime is wartime.All eyes to the crime-boss

Sonic Nurse will fulfill all your dude-ranch dreams. Even if they are bound to fall apart sooner or later.

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