Sonic Youth – SYR3 – Review

Sonic Youth

 SYR3 (Smells Like)
by Nik Rainey

As befits the band that took apart the machinery of rock and reassembled it in its own, debased-artiste image (the opposite of the usual noble-savage rock archetype), Sonic Youth can’t seem to shut themselves up about it. SY’s “official” LPs are like beautifully-constructed four-way dialogues in a new, discordant language; the deluge of side projects, tribute-album tracks and tossed-off experiments fall somewhere between glossolalia and gibberish. Put another way, their albums shoehorn their deconstructivism into concrete song-forms; in the interim, they tend to go self-indulgently barefoot. Not, as another New Yorker who re-arranged the face of a staid popular artform once said, that there’s anything wrong with that: in fact, I myself have listened to and actively enjoyed the goony sound collage on the flipside of the “Master-Dik” 12-inch far more often than the acknowledged masterpiece that followed,Daydream Nation, which kinda just glares heavily at me from my alphabetically-arranged milk crate. Nothing wrong with the casual notepad-scratchings of geniuses on their day off: it brings you a little closer to the frailties, failings, and funtimes of the pedestal-dweller, and god help us, it might even make them (and, thanks to the laws of symbiosis that govern rock’n’roll, us) better people.

All of which is just a high-falutin’ way to say that SY’s 3-EP “Musical Perspectives” series, packaged in near-identical semi-generic library packaging but for the color of the sleeves (or, for the archaic arcanaphile, the vinyl) and the languages in which the titles are writ, is an offhanded blessing, the sound of a great band stretching out and running through their paces as warmup for their next, full-blown statement (due sometime this year on DGC). Basically instrumental (but for a couple of incidental Kim Gordon vocals), these records play like lengthy extensions of their bubbling, churning instro breaks, showing off Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s almost-psychic dualistic guitar bond and the sympathetic anchorage of Gordon and Steve Shelley’s low-ends which keep their flights of fantasy earthbound and solid. SYR2 (Dutch, turquoise cover) kicks off with a jump-cut noise blowout, which settles into a clanging, exploratory groove (“Slaapkamers Met Slagroom”), followed by a languid, cymbal-punctuated meander (“Stil”) and a minimal, spatial coda (“Herinneringen”). SYR3 (Esperanto, black cover) distinguishes itself as one of the longest EPs in human history (56:34), and as a sustained burst of tonal improv, with the ubiquitous Jim O’Rourke on hand to lengthen and strengthen the pieces, which pulsate with ionic radio wave-bursts, trumpet bleats and near-ambient drifts into almost total silence: a shimmering real-time mirage of perpetual motion and stasis. Neither for those anticipating the next “Kool Thing,” nor guilty of the occasional lapses into artsy aimlessness they’re sometimes inured to, these records bubble with magmic grace, which, if used to bolster their return to songcraft, may make the next move from Sonic Youth one of their best yet.