Murray street

Description

After the difficult and uneven "A Thousand Leaves" and "NYC Ghosts & Flowers," it is nice to see Sonic Youth back in great form. "Murray Street," the band's first album in its new version (Jim O'Rourke is now a full-fledged musician), starts slowly with three long tracks driven by curiously tame guitars. Then, slowly, the Sonic Youth sauce resumes and everything comes together. The glory of yesterday, everything that contributed to the uniqueness of "Daydream Nation," returns in a more accessible version: almost pop melodies are carefully perverted by guitars with experimental tunings, then, through long musical revolutions that remind those who may have forgotten that the band of Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore, and Steve Shelley owes as much to Sun Ra as to Television, even if, in the end, it is more to a kind of post-no wave Grateful Dead that one thinks.
Indie version of the Dead's hippie experience, Sonic Youth (not so young anymore, by the way), embarks on great escapades into uncharted territories, improvises, experiments, then lands on its feet and returns to its place. Sometimes it works, often it doesn't. "Murray Street" is one of those precious albums from the band where everything miraculously works. A windfall.