Sonic Youth
Sonic Nurse

THE REVIEW

This year I'm tidying up the drawers. So many things I'm throwing away. They're useless to keep, they've had their time, they've oxidized, deteriorated, turned to dust. One needs to have the courage to clean up once in a while, eliminate the superfluous, resize the living space, exhume what's truly necessary. A painful phase for me, who tends to build precarious Babylons of memories, scraps, remnants, and leftovers of life with the hope of reusing them in the future. But this year I feel this urgent need to reduce the baggage I'll carry in the years to come to the essentials. I want to travel light. Finally light. And, damn it, behind me, the deluge!

There's an album that has just come out that perfectly reflects this moment of mine: Sonic Nurse by Sonic Youth. It has been accompanying me for weeks in the background during my moments of disposal, both mental and material. It gives me the right energy: dynamic, fluidity, irritation, reaction, consolation, independence.
It's more or less the nineteenth work of Sonic Youth, not counting collateral collaborations and similar oddities. Sonic Youth: I have always admired them, even in their lowest and most boring moments. Even today I wouldn’t know which of their albums I’d take to a desert island. Daydream Nation or Dirty? Or maybe I’d take Goo, or even Evol, and why not Confusion Is Sex… So undecided. I love them as much as I adore Fugazi and Pixies. My Holy Trinity of the Nineties.
There are those who say they can't play, that technically they're dogs on guitars, that they are repetitive in their noise now outdated, overused, moldy. They even say it here on Debaser. But in this particular case, I don’t give a damn about the blah blah blah of expert music-mathematicians and onanists. I love them because they know how to play my “strings”, making me vibrate and suffer on the same wavelength as theirs. Sorry if that’s little.
Sonic Nurse concludes the trilogy on the “way of life” of New York which started with NYC Ghost & Flowers and Murray Street. Like NYC Ghost, this new album was conceived by Thurston as a solo and acoustic work, but in the rehearsal room, the others in the group voraciously took it over, overturning the project, with the result that I now feel it vibrating in the organ placed between my ears. In this new work, there's the return of Kim Gordon to the microphone, as seductive and oblique as ever, appearing on four tracks: the contrasting and slanted "Pattern Recognition", the enveloping, hypnotic "I Love You Golden Blue", the sweet "Dude Ranch Nurse" which among sensual trappings is a very subtle critique of the American government: Dude Ranches are holiday places where rich Americans go to spend weekends dressed as “cowboys”. SY in their Dude Ranch would stuff all of Texas, including the Bush family and their White House buddies, in the company of provocative and cruel nurses equipped with drugged syringes to soothe their “hormonal rushes”…

Still between the lines, critiques against the US government also in "Peace Attack", where they emphasize the deterioration of the term “peace”, which has become the watchword chewed like chewing gum by the world's powerful during the attacks in the Middle East.
In the rest of the album, which I avoid describing not to bore you too much, Thurston Moore is in dazzling form with his irreducible and spontaneous vocality, balancing between adult restlessness and adolescent impertinence. Ranaldo and Shelley, no less, are in a state of transversal grace, tart but mature, and in the refinement phase at the mixer there is the masterful Jim O'Rourke, who is by now officially a member of the band.

This is a family that has existed for twenty-three years, which has managed, despite the relentlessness of time, to remain indissoluble and to produce records without respite, independently, without quarrels and without breaks. It's rare for a band to last so long and remain so crucial for alternative music at the same time. Since 1981, Sonic Youth has been manipulating new & no wave, punk attitude, contemporary art, free-jazz influences, a passion for American roots, and unwavering love for noise, all with great personality and class.
What else can I say? That I'm a masochist, and that while enjoying it I'm here, listening again, and again, and again to the cruel feedback, the sharp melodies, the rhythms slurred in the dark, the heartbreaking stop & go of these delightful torturers. I love them, but I think I’ve already told you that.

People who are aging damn well. And this is an enchanting, special, and brilliant album. An album that, in this moment of my global purge, reassures me.

Youth against time!