Rapidshare sonic youth murray street

As everyone probably expected, that whole 'this is our classic rock album' gambit was a big goof. While the band's new quintet structure offers the potential for some Skynyrd-style three-guitar freakouts, the guys and gal limit themselves to the occasional old-school namedrop Lou Reed, "Tiny Dancer" and a handful of FM-ready riffs.

No, Sonic Youth still sounds like good ol' Sonic Youth, albeit with a focus on melodic improvisation only rarely heard before. If the band is revealing its roots to any oldies act, it's to Lee Ranaldo's long-cherished Grateful Dead. Three tracks here run long-distance events in the six-to-nine-minute range, and one Ranaldo's "Karen Revisited" rides a long ambient section all the way up to Sonic Youth's always had long songs, but not too many that stay as tightly focused and listenable as these; they're finally capitalizing on the jammy possibilities suggested by "The Diamond Sea.

Importantly, these astral flights are usually filling in the space around semi-traditional song structures, avoiding the spoken-word incantations and directionless instrumentals of recent albums on both DGC and SYR imprints. If vocal duties can be considered representative of songwriting leadership, it's Thurston Moore who's leading the charge here, as he takes the mic on more than half of Murray Street 's songs.

His twisty "The Empty Page" and spooky "Disconnection Notice" are certainly no new directions for the lankiest man in rock and roll, but offer up foundations as exciting to hear as the unscripted passages. Kim Gordon's contributions, meanwhile, are curiously backloaded to the end of the album-- a sequencing that would have been merciful on the last few albums, but is surprisingly unnecessary for the double shot of goodness found here.

The centerpiece, "Karen Revisited," finds Ranaldo again claiming his crown as the band's best hook-writer before exploding into ultraviolet feedback-- a segment that'll have Jeremy doing cartwheels, but'll have Erica jumping for the fast-forward button. And then, there's Jim O'Rourke.

Ahhh, Jim; say what you will about the guy, but he's now worked his mysterious influence over not one, but two of the year's finest albums and it's only June -- I fully expect him to announce production duties on some kind of afterworld-bridging Beatles reunion any day now.

At the very least, the perplexing twenty-years-along addition of a fifth member seems to have given the Youth just the kick in the ass they needed to stop making merely good albums that hit with segments of the fan population and get back to making great ones that resonate with everybody.

Journalistic integrity aside, it gives me great pleasure to be able to like a new Sonic Youth album without having to force it, and to finally give their back catalog a nice, long rest. You can bet your hat there's gonna be Jeremies who say Murray Street isn't far-out enough, and Ericas who would prefer the band kept things under four minutes, but a whole lot of in-between folk are going to be pleased as punch with the results.

Skip to content Search query All Results. But Murray Street doesn't just rehash the sound of their late-'80s heyday, either; for the most part, epics like the '60s-tinged "The Empty Page" and "Rain on Tin" -- which sounds a bit like a rural cousin to Television 's "Marquee Moon" -- are built on surprisingly clean, crisp guitar tones that only explode into occasional noise-storms.

Indeed, the guitar work on the album's first three tracks is both economical and sensual, a feast of textures and counterpoints that never sounds overdone. Murray Street 's wonderfully natural yet intricate sound is O'Rourke 's most distinctive contribution to the group; while his work with Smog and Wilco pushed those groups to be more experimental and eclectic, with Sonic Youth he seems to give those tendencies focus and balance.

Even the hypnotic drones at the end of "Karen Revisited," the album's noisy, oddly romantic centerpiece, have a unique precision and clarity. Murray Street 's first four songs rank among the most consistent, and consistently exciting, work in Sonic Youth 's career, so much so that the album's shorter, more rock-oriented songs feel a bit anticlimactic.

Closing with the serenely sexy "Sympathy for the Strawberry," Murray Street reaffirms that at the group's best, Sonic Youth manages to sound fresh and timeless all at once. AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age. Aggressive Bittersweet Druggy. Energetic Happy Hypnotic. Romantic Sad Sentimental. Sexy Trippy All Moods.

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