Time passages

Sonic Youth's nyc ghosts & flowers

by Jon Garelick

Can Sonic Youth still surprise? It's been nearly 20 years since the band (b. 1981) began their art-punk experiments. They're seven albums into a major-label deal that began with the release of Goo in 1990. Their dissonant drones, off-kilter punk anthems, and sing-speech poetry have long been absorbed into pop culture's bloodstream. The new nyc ghosts & flowers (DGC) arrives sounding in its own way as familiar as a new Neil Young album -- and just as fresh and satisfying.

The new album catches the band at their droniest -- from the first chiming guitar pedal point, songs build over seven-minute spans, accreting density, mass, and volume, a static two-note or one-chord serving as a ground to the whorls of electric guitar noise around it -- T.S. Eliot's "still center of the turning world." In its way, the music has the kind of "process"-like simplicity of early Steve Reich and Philip Glass -- little cells of rhythm and melody building in depth and density with the addition of more rhythms, more instruments, more noise.

This is a long way from the verse-chorus-verse imperatives of pop, what critic Ellen Willis long ago identified as "rock-and-roll's oldest metaphor for modern city life -- anarchic energy contained by a tight, repetitive structure." But Sonic Youth have always had it both ways. Since their first EPs, they've mixed pop with drone and song with open-ended improv -- anarchy -- to stunning emotional effect. The band have made their share of "pop" singles -- "Kills Yr. Idols," "Teen Age Riot," "Kool Thing," "My Friend Goo." But more often than not their tight grids of city life have given way to broad landscapes of sound. "We're gonna kill the California girls," Thurston Moore once sang prettily. "Mystery train, freeway plane, expressway to your skull." The song built and subsided, built and subsided, for another five minutes before floating away. An art song, driven more by inner logic than received structure. Moore's vocals, that wisp of melody and its final cadence ("expressway . . . to your skull"), were a sketch, a reference point, the "meaning" of the noise that subsumed it. They functioned as Harold Rosenberg described the paintings of Willem de Kooning, like a pair of plump Marilyn lips floating on "a hurricane of paint. . . . These painted lips, masks of feeling, represented also academic art tossed on the waves of art as life."

If I stretch into art criticism to find a vocabulary to describe Sonic Youth, it's only because I'm surprised, again and again, at how surprising they can be, despite their familiarity. Elvis's mystery train on an American landscape, the optimistic California of the Beach Boys, turned into a hostile assault, a trip into inner space, "tossed on the waves of art as life." The gambit of "Expressway to Yr Skull" has been played over and over since it first appeared on 1986's EVOL, most recently on "The Diamond Sea" (the waves of art as life indeed), from 1995's Washing Machine, 20 minutes of guitar-and-drum variations on a theme that begins "Time takes its crazy toll."

Sonic Youth's music is the most "abstract" pop I know -- and yet it's some of the only pop I know that is about anything, if only because it seems to carry more emotional weight. Sex, friendships, pop music, celebrity worship, spirituality, and, in "The Diamond Sea," fidelity and death -- it's all there, even if I'm hesitant to ascribe any single meaning to a particular song (another way in which they're different from most rock bands and solo artists). Some of Sonic Youth's lyrics have the feeling of automatic writing, or on nyc ghosts & flowers, of Beat poetry ("the cops beat the bearded oracles/replacing tantric love with complete violence," Moore recites over a warped "Get Back" guitar riff on "small flowers crack concrete," a tribute to poet D.A. Levy). The cover art of the new album is by William S. Burroughs, and it also includes imagery by NYC poet Joe Brainard.

I don't find these allusions at all affected. The band have earned them in their two decades of making art. Their press material for the current album says it "may be interpreted as a gritty soundtrack to the band's long-time home town." With half the band (Moore and his wife Kim Gordon) now having moved to Western Massachusetts with their child, and with all those years of experience under the group's collective belt, the album has an elegiac feel, and it's this unity of feeling, the continuity of the material from track to track, that puts it, I think, on a par with what's generally regarded as Sonic Youth's masterwork, 1988's Daydream Nation.

Originally released as a vinyl double LP, that album lasts 70 minutes; it pummels and assaults, filled with intent to upset the established order (pop, politics, you name it), beginning with "Teen Age Riot." The current album is a mere 40 minutes, its music proceeding in soft washes of sound ("The songs are based on visions of shared color and greyscale meditation" reads the press bio, baring Moore's verbal tics). But despite its violence, the heart of the earlier album for me was always the three-minute ditty at its midpoint, "Providence," which is really little more than an answering-machine message (an indie-rock songwriting staple). A lovely piano tinkles a Satie-like ditty in the background under a thick layer of static and we hear beeps and a rough, urgent male voice: "Thurston! . . . Thurston! I think it's 10:30, we're calling from Providence, Rhode Island. Did you find your shit?"

It's a voice from the dark, from the road, in transit, but a fixed time and place amid the timeless whorl of sound and sensation, and with the piano in the background it's that "still center," a moment of repose that exerts an emotional tug on the rest of the album. For me, it's always been a sad yet reassuring rant. "Your fucking memory goes out the window," the voice scolds, with the Satie piano and static making the voice itself sound like a memory. "Call later, bye."

The new album takes off from that soft center of Daydream Nation. Its ghosts exert the same earthly pull as that ghostly voice on the "Providence" answering machine. "free city rhymes" unspools quietly from its opening pedal point, with the gradual addition of rhythm and speed, for a full two minutes before Moore enters, singing, "in a free lane/ghost passing time." And the drone downshifts into a chord change, timeless dream giving way to lived experience ("time takes its crazy toll"). Throughout the album, mantra-like recitations and ostinatos slip into time, static repetition becoming linear progression. Sometimes it's a chord change at just the right moment, sometimes it's drummer Steve Shelley's precisely struck tapping cymbal patterns, like bright stitched beadwork on a cloud of sound. "Renegade princess" begins as a recitation over koto-like chiming ("jet black hair/tangled stare") before cutting loose after a minute or so in an anthem of Patti Smith-like ferocity. In "small flowers crack concrete," Moore's recitation becomes "blue lights search through weeds, searching for the heart of D.A. Levy/and the mind he left behind" before breaking into the sung verse with a burst of rhythm and volume: "what did you expect/another mystic wreck." And then back to Beat recitation: "death poems for the living gods of America/plastic saxophones bleat/bleed for nothing, nada." What threatened to be a precious bit of poetic indulgence unfolds as narrative, Moore's anger at Levy, himself ("what did you expect"), America, all of a piece. These elegies lace through the album. "He's turned to dust now," sings the voice of what sounds like SY guitarist Lee Ranaldo on the album's title track, "one of the chosen few -- left out in the rain, out of town again. . . . on a crimson bumper by a chrome highway/I last saw you."

In last year's double CD of works by 20th-century composers, Goodbye 20th Century, Sonic Youth experimented with the "timelessness" of work by Cage, Reich, Christian Wolff, and others -- the post-serialist dissolution of progression by way of time signatures, chord progressions, traditional harmony. On nyc ghosts & flowers they're back in time -- or at least caught in the tension between time and timelessness, mortality and immortality. The world of lived experience, the transcendence of art. In fact, if I were going to say nyc ghosts & flowers is about anything, I'd say it's about art. After a nursery-rhyme litany about boys and girls (where the boys go to gym and "get more stupider" and the girls become rock stars), Gordon breaks into song, "come on down, down to the river/come on down/jump right in." It's a recruitment anthem for artists. Twenty years ago, Sonic Youth's noise pop was a call to arms; it still is.

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Sonic Youth headline Avalon, in Boston, with openers Stereolab on June 15. Call (617) 423-6398.