A Return to Form… Or Back to Basics?
Reconsidering Sonic Youth’s Murray Street at the 20-Year Mark
It may upset your self-image and cause your Gen-X hair to look a little thinner in the mirror, but this month marks the twentieth anniversary of Sonic Youth’s Murray Street.
Released on the 25th of June, 2002 in North America, the band’s twelfth full-length ‘mainstream’ studio album was seen at the time of its release as something of a ‘comeback’ record, a return to form. This view, however, depends largely on how one views the band’s output over the previous decade.
By 2002, the band had released six studio albums on DGC/Geffen, as well as five experimental albums on their own independent label, SYR, and a number of solo and side-project records. Given the variety of the material released, the argument can be made that they had to some degree alienated virtually every pocket of fickle fans that had come on board since the mid 1980s. The Geffen albums in general had offended the sensibilities of college-radio purists; the later Geffen albums had ignored the angst and challenged the attention span of grunge’s most jaded followers; the SYR releases and side projects had baffled the hell out of those who knew nothing of free jazz and modern classical. From a host of different perspectives, the band had nowhere to go but up.
By the time recording started on the album, Jim O’Rourke had become an official fifth member of the band. O’Rourke had assisted the group in the production of their previous Geffen album, 2000’s NYC Ghosts & Flowers, and played on three of its tracks. He had similarly contributed to their 1998 SYR release Invito Al Ĉielo, which is credited to Sonic Youth / Jim O’Rourke. For his debut as a full-fledged member, he played bass guitar on most tracks and is credited with the recording, engineering and mixing.
Recorded at their own Echo Canyon studio (51 Murray St., NYC) beginning in August of 2001, Murray Street was largely a byproduct of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. The recording sessions were interrupted by the terrorist attack and, once resumed, didn’t conclude until March of 2002. During the interim, the band played at a Trade Center benefit festival and various other benefit gigs. The tragedy and resultant mood of the times is definitely reflected in the tone of the finished product.
The album opens with ‘The Empty Page’. A somewhat subdued melodic rocker sung by Thurston Moore, it brings to mind the literary journals that published blank pages in memory of the victims of 9–11. This is followed by ‘Disconnection Notice’, a slow-moving moody ballad of sorts that is just short enough (6:34) to maintain one’s attention at this early stage of the record. The album reaches its zenith, arguably, with the extended tracks ‘Rain on Tin’ and ‘Karen Revisited’ (renamed ‘Karenology’ for some reason, post-album). Their order reversed for the vinyl edition, the former is an asymmetrical eight-minute number that features two brief verses sung by Moore followed by a lengthy fast-paced guitar jam; the latter, a catchy chunk of upbeat Lee Ranaldo surrealism (“Down beneath the radar screen / She’s lit up like gasoline”) that dissolves into a protracted outro of ponderous guitar improv recorded at the song’s live debut in October of ’01 (total time: 11:10). Next is the peculiarly titled ‘Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style’, an up-tempo number that would not be all that memorable if it were not for the presence of Borbetomagus’s Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich on screeching horns. Interestingly, unlike all Sonic Youth albums before and after, Kim Gordon’s (two) turns at the mic are reserved for last. Previously recorded for inclusion on a Jane Magazine sampler CD, ‘Plastic Sun’ is a two-minute punkish flare-up of quirky guitar and snarling vocals — its basic melody somewhat reminiscent of Dirty’s ‘Crème Brulee’ ten years earlier. It is unquestionably the weakest track on the album. Gordon manages to hold it together vocally for the closing ‘Sympathy for the Strawberry’, a laidback nine-minute number with an enticing bass-driven groove and shoegazy lyrics of that distinctive Kim variety (“She likes to dance when it’s dark inside / Just a flashlight there / for a guide”).
Whether by design or simply by accident, the album’s cover art is a reflexion of the closing number: the cover photo depicts Coco, the young daughter of Moore and Gordon, picking strawberries with a friend.
As was the case with most Sonic Youth albums, Murray Street came with a number of ‘companion pieces’ or related releases recorded during the same sessions or time frame. There was no official single released off the album (although videos were made for ‘The Empty Page’ and ‘Disconnection Notice’), but a ten-inch EP of (mostly) instrumental tracks entitled Kali Yug Express was included with some copies of Murray Street in France. Limited to 500 copies, side one of this record features ‘Derniere Minute Electrifee’ from the Things Behind the Sun (2001) soundtrack, and side two features ‘Le Paysage Zim Zum’ and ‘Coca Neon Kamera Sutra’ from the Demonlover (2002) soundtrack. Eight other (mostly instrumental) tracks recorded for the latter film at Echo Canyon in 2001 and early 2002 — along with a track apiece from Goldfrapp, Death in Vegas, Dub Squad and Soulfly — were released in November of ’02 as the Bande Originale Du Film Demonlover CD in France. One of those tracks, ‘Electric Noisefield’, is actually an excerpt from ‘Street Sauce’, an instrumental bonus track on the Japanese edition of the Murray Street CD. Two further instrumental tracks recorded for Demonlover, ‘Sweet Emotion’ and ‘Lord of Your Thighs’ (both mischievously entitled with a nod to ’70s Aerosmith), would be released as a seven-inch single on the Time-Lag label in the latter months of ’02. The seven-inch was actually released as part of a five-artist, five-single box set commemorating the fifth Terrastock festival in the fall of that year, and — like the Sister album fifteen years earlier — is credited to The Sonic Youth. It’s interesting to note that a 30-minute film by Yorick Le Saux, SY NYC 12/12/01: The Demonlover Sessions (2003), documents Sonic Youth’s recording of the Demonlover score.
Why the Demonlover soundtrack hasn’t been released on vinyl sometime over the past two decades is baffling. Why the Things Behind The Sun soundtrack hasn’t been released in physical form at all is even more baffling. It’s a shame that all of these sessions from 2001–02 haven’t been collected in a Murray Street Deluxe Edition box set.
Returning to Murray Street’s reputation as a ‘comeback’ album or ‘return to form’, I think it’s safe to say that such a resurgence is in the ear of the beholder.
Like it or lump it, but in many ways Murray Street’s two immediate predecessors represent Sonic Youth at its creative, artistic apex. With hindsight, the band’s mid-to-late ’90s output — the increasingly jammy and conceptually sombre Washing Machine and A Thousand Leaves, the first three improv-driven SYR / Musical Perspectives releases — was a musical and lyrical uphill trek that culminated in Goodbye 20th Century in 1999 and NYC Ghosts & Flowers in 2000; the SYR double album of modern classical interpretations representing the musical side of the group taken to its logical extreme, and the Geffen ‘mainstream’ release representing the lyrical/poetic side of the band taken to its corresponding zenith. Following these releases, the band would find itself returning to the more simplified, ‘radio-friendly’ approach that guided their more famous and celebrated albums from the later ’80s and early ’90s. This is evident in their final three Geffen releases, their 2009 Matador album, and even the SYR / Simon Werner a disparu soundtrack.
Thus a ‘stripped-back’ sort of album by a band who had just come off an extended period of experimentation and self-testing might sound like a ‘comeback’ or ‘return to form’ to a person who had become a fan ten to fifteen years earlier — especially one who had given the previous decade’s worth of material only a cursory listen at best.
I’ve long maintained that there are two main types of Sonic Youth fans: Sonic Youth fans and Daydream Nation fans. Bearing the latter fan attitude in mind while reconsidering the album in question objectively, Murray Street comes dangerously close to being the first generic Sonic Youth album.
Amy Phillips wrote in her review for The Village Voice that “The new album isn’t terrible, just dull.” I don’t completely agree, but I can see her point. Murray Street is not an exciting album per se, but it probably wasn’t meant to be. Imagine taking half the numbers from the Daydream Nation double album (1988) and putting them through the mood filters of middle age and 9–11. That, I think, is a fairly apt description of the general sound of Murray Street.
Overall, from a 2022 perspective, Murray Street was a respectable album by a band that still had lots to do and say, but nothing left to prove.
