Diehard old school Sonic Youth fans are most likely taking a look at the cover art for Sonic Youth’s new album and peeing themselves with excitement. It hearkens back to the glory days of the band’s status as the rulers of the New York City no-wave scene. It’s a classic NYC punk rock logo: the band’s name emblazoned on a red backdrop in army lettering through an oozing blob of black paint. It looks punk rock as hell. Any person who misses the noise experiments of Bad Moon Rising and EVOL are probably thinking that Sonic Youth are making a triumphant return to their roots; dropping an all-out noise assault on the
sensitive indie types and neo-hippies that were into the clean, lazy summer jams of Murray Street and Sonic Nurse. Well, to those people, turn away and lock yourself in with your old SST LP’s because this is a much, much different band.
Rather Ripped is by far the most user-friendly, concise, polished effort that Sonic Youth have released up to this point, a further extension on the warm embrace of Sonic Nurse. However, that album had its fair share of challenges, what with most of the songs averaging a length of about seven minutes. The longest song on Rather Ripped is seven minutes, and most of the songs don’t pass the four minute mark. What used to take Sonic Youth five-to-ten minutes to do now takes them three, and notably absent from this album is the band’s inclination towards musical exploration. What was and, really, still is, the band’s trademarks are valleys and peaks, tension and release, and quiet-and-loud dynamics; and that usually took SY a long time to do in one song. But the trick of Rather Ripped is that the band has learned how to condense those experiments into four minute indie rock songs.
But enough about the change; the real question is, how are the songs? Well, this band has delivered another batch of excellent tracks, as evidenced by the 1-2-3 KO of the opening trilogy. “Reena” is a bouncy, poppy Kim Gordon number and it works to surprisingly good effect. There is a “noise” breakdown in the middle, but those quotation marks are meant to be much larger. It’s extremely brief, and not nearly as loud, atonal or abrasive as previous noise bridges on other SY tracks. “Incinerate” may be the most “rock” track here, but it’s nothing like older work by the band. And yet, these are really great songs, not just endless jams but real, tight numbers rather then compositions.
Some fans may be a little put off by Sonic Youth’s evolution from experimental no-wavers to indie rock tunesmiths, but it really doesn’t matter because the product speaks for itself. Rather Ripped is SY’s Terror Twilight, a somewhat conventional record for an otherwise experimental band as they approach the afterglow the next step of their storied career. |