I think it just dawned on me
 

...that Sonic Nurse is the best SY album.

I'm a big lover of ATL and Murray but Nurse is just consistently cool. The only real downer is Lee's one and only track... it isn't his hottest (nor the album's), but everything else is really stellar. Stones is endlessly rock and roll, Mariah Carey is playful and sonically out of this world, Unmade Bed is gentle but still stings real hard in certain places. I mean...wow

Maybe I'm behind the curve on these kinds of opinion polls here, but am I alone in thinking this?

Dood.....Paper Cut Exit.....is fucking awesome.

I do enjoy some parts of it .. "memory disease..." that sounds cool as hell, but I dunno it doesn't strike me as a whole.

Was it during that Q interview that T said something about Nurse being their best attempt to fuse noise stuff with pop song structure? I see where he's coming from with that

*is gay

Yer gay!


Faggot.

I think it just dawned of the deaded on me. Holler Ya?

Yer a parody....




faggot.

PS......I have no idea what you are talking about murmer....though....I'm assuming its from a movie.....and I don't watch many movies because I am a boring fucktard.

Oh...haha....



well.....here's a hilarious clips of two hamsters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VuMdLm0ccU

Never thought all that much of Sonic Nurse myself.

As soon as I heard it I got the impression that it was a product of final contractual obligations with Geffen.

The two albums that preceded NYC G&F and Murray Street where something of a disappointment for me. A new direction was taken but then abandoned only to come full circle back to much visited older sounds.

Both albums where solid examples of SY's many years of discovery in the studio and where good of examples of classic SY. But just a bit of a let down in terms of what was done with the two albums before.

I must say though, The Internal has been good listening.

I could never really fault any SY albums. Everything they have ever done to me has been great but each album does has it's particular place in my understanding of what SY music means to me.

I do hope we see more albums post KG/TM separation....

t

Ha ha, 'The Internal'... doh!

Sounds like a spy film...

'Sonic Youth in 'The Internal' - License to Dischord'

:)

I really liked SY's song "Youth of the Nation". I'll never forget blasting that track over SiriusXM every Sunday as we headed into the house of the Lord.

notreally

I've got a catholic block...

i dont mind listening to that album. but the neat thing about it being a double album is always deciding on what side to play first. as much as it's not in a heavy rotation compared to the other SY albums i got. it's alright. but i doubt i've played it 10 times all the way thru yet. but it's alright.

That depends on whether you are following the rules of British English or American English. The British consider "Sonic Youth" to be plural, as they do with teams names and other groups. In America, we treat it as a "collective noun," which makes it singular. In other words, when we say "Sonic Youth," we are referring to a single band, not the collection of individuals who comprise the band.

I'm sure that's more explanation than anyone gives a crap to read! :+)

When Sonic Youth are melodic, they sound the bee's knees.

I thought this right after I listened to it, then remembered that daydream nation still exists

It's probably my third favourite SY album. And their best album lyrically, in my opinion

Going to go put it on right now. It's not my fav - but I think it needs a fair revisit in light of this... going to run errands. Nurse will soundtrack.

While I'm on the topic I think The Eternal is rad too. A lot of it's pretty standard SY song-writing but they really make the most of it. Songs like What We Know, Calming the Snake and No Way..really awesome stuff

All the SY albums are rad....except for Dirty and RR.....RR's songs are meehhhhhh save a few...and Dirty just sounds weird...not the songs, everything else....

If you consider Sonic Nurse to be their best record God knows which one is their worst for you.

Whatever bro, I have T on my side on this one! For the record, my least fav. is probably Experimental


I've been listening to RR recently..some really cool moments wrapped in some great but mostly decent songs (by SY standards). The middle of Turquoise Boy, for instance, where it goes from gentle harmonics to rocking out to total Bad Moon-esque doom and gloom in the space of a minute or so...so fucking awesome. And of course tracks like Pink Steam and Incinerate are great, too.

RR is OK....just not as rad as every other album...

I think I need to listen to RR again...


the Neutral...and Jams run free are also great songs..(besides the obvious Reena n Pink steam)

Are saying evol is a bad album?

I hope you get kicked in the nuts.

Yeah, they totally sold out to the mainstream on EVOL.

you are not alone. it seems though many SY funs really dislike the melodic songs. this album dawned on me some years ago. I used to try to share that thrill with friends but realised it's hard to find someone with the same mood at the same time, particulary when the matter is SY. It was a quite lonely thrill then.
by that time I thought it was the best album ever but funny is that I've had this same feeling about other SY albuns in different life moments - man! this is the best album I could ever have heard!

Sonic Nurse is the best album put out by SY out of their last 4-5.

I still canniot bring myself to spin The Eternal. It depresses me still that SY is no more.

RR is a cool album, with some great tunes, but as a whole it is not top 5 material. Murray Street to me was good too, but again, a bit of a tepid slog. I miss the adrenaline rush SY used to give me. Sonic Nurse is the last SY album that still gives me that OOOOMPPPHHHH from the skronk rock.

Does anyone agree that "Pattern Recognition" is a great song, the best song on the album? Meaning: the rest of the album is something of a let-down?

the best song on Nurse is I Love YOu Golden Blue. It rules, and is something of a successor to Shadow of a Doubt for me. Golden Blue is just straight up perfect, especially if you are driving alone late at night through back country roads. very sad song.

after that I would say Pattern Recognition is second, but it makes a great album opener for sure.

Dude Ranch Nurse, and then Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Creme come next to round out my top 4 off Nurse. It has some of the best KIM stuff ever.

I don't think it's the best, but I can see how a major Sonic Youth fan might think so. To me, as an album, it's actually not very strong, yet it is full of great great songs. It's not like DDN or Murray Street, both albums defined by their beginning to end flow; it's more like a compilation of individual songs that don't seem to have a whole lot to do with one another. But they're some of the best songs the band came up with on the second half of their career.

Pattern Recognition comes closer to the intensity of DDN and Sister than any other song of the '90s or '00s.

Pattern Recognition, Dripping Dream, I Love You Golden Blue, Peace Attack. Those are the highlights.

As albums, I prefer Murray Street and Ripped, but in terms of individual songs, Nurse is just incredible. If you play everything after PR on shuffle, abd leave the last two songs in their original places, then yeah- it's up there.

Funny thing: it wasn't until I saw "unmade bed" live that I really understood how influential hardcore was to Sonic Youth's sound. I was in my twenties and had been listening to Sonic Youth for a decade, and it was nowhere near my first Sonic Youth show. But something about the song's live execution- not to mention that it's one of their most mellow songs and it still rocked like hell- made a lightbulb turn on above my head.

Interesting respknse to unmade bed severian. And I'm glad you sai drippin dream as it is my favorite song of that album. The way it transitions turns me on to the max. Oh god...and that outtro!!!!

Sonic nurse is definitely top 5 material IMO.

No, it's not too much. In fact it's about damn time. Thank you. Someone needed to explain this in simple terms.

As for me, I don't care about what the Brits do. The band is called Sonic Youth. Like Black Sabbath. Collective noun all day long. The cover of Sister was a fluke.
I had a friend in college who referred to them as "the" Sonic Youth all the time and it sounded pretentious as hell.

I'm not sure why... But he was a pretentious son of a bitch anyway, so there you go.

Severian is a '' I want to be a Pitchfork faggot'' sort of guy. Why is he complaining about shit?

Perhaps this has something to do with the post 2000 era of the single-song-format (itunes or download) release concept vs. entire album concept thing, intentionally or not. I wouldn't think that SY would approach it that way, but it does seem like the ideas/concepts are compressed down to individual songs. It seems like the album is a mishmash of influences, from William Gibson/PKD to Bush, the Richard Prince Nurse artwork/paintings. I wish I knew more about what the influences and making of this album were. The songs are great, and sometimes SY's off-kilter odd song or take on things was part of their charm. I still think Nurse was one of their better, later records and kinda represented to me, what I thought there aiming to do, which was meld a certain brand of sonic pop noise rock hybrid. Nurse was, to me the best execution, and one of the SY albums that far surpassed my expectations. I kinda always wanted an inverse Sonic Nurse where most of the tracks sounded like Arthur Doyle/Mariah Carey, and only a couple tracks were melodic. I remember telling my buddies, okay THIS is better than Zepplin.. (talking about Stones) I'm thankful I got to see them in 2004 when I really got back into the band.

(....my Pitchfork piece, hah) :)

It was the Sonic Youth album I listened toots recently. Definitely great. I picked it over everything else I own yesterday because of this thread alone.