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Sonic Youth
Rather Ripped (Geffen/Universal)
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Things usually go one of two ways when a singular band starts simply sounding like itself: it can either keep sleepwalking, or it can continue to amaze with the unexplored depths of its vision. The unthinkable appeared to be catching up with Sonic Youth in recent years, the fan-acknowledged doldrums of 2000's
NYC Ghosts and Flowers having found only mild redemption in the restrained, sorta-programmatic jammery of
Murray Street and
Sonic Nurse. Yet on
Rather Ripped, the living New York legends make a "conventional" record that only sounds conventional because Sonic Youth has spent 25 years accustoming us to its alien tunings, slanted melodies and miasmic clouds of feedback. By condensing all those years of bloody-minded sprawl and squall into tight, lingering, three-minute songs without sacrificing the mercurial structures, subversive lyrical bent and reverence for noise that identify Sonic Youth as Sonic Youth, it stands with the quartet's finest work. It also acknowledges the band's greatest triumph in bending the pop form to accommodate avant-garde formlessness in much the same way as fellow N.Y. iconoclasts the Velvet Underground (checked nicely with a bit of "Sunday Morning" sparkle on "Do You Believe In Rapture?") and Television (whose twin-guitar glissandros are echoed all over this disc).
Ripped scene-stealer Kim Gordon permits herself to sing more prettily than ever on "Turquoise Boy" and "The Neutral," while a few veiled references to romantic hurdles on her "What A Waste" and hubby Thurston Moore's "Sleeping Around" are as close as indie-rock's uber-couple have ever come to humanizing their relationship in song.
Ben Rayner