Rather Exhilarating

Forget "edge," or whatever the edgy are calling it these days. I wish we could forget their non-youth in the bargain, but that wheeze will remain with us—they create from what they know. So let me put it this way: Sonic Youth are the best band in the universe, and if you can't get behind that, that's your problem. They haven't made a bad album since Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo found perfect drummer Steve Shelley in 1985, and (forget Radiohead, forget Wilco) have released more good ones in the past decade than anyone in rock except—this is funny—Neil Young. That definitely includes the brand-new Rather Ripped, a light-seeming, unprecedentedly hooky thing that could prove one of their best. Ignore it to your spiritual detriment.

Sonic Nurse, the band's last record, and last of three with avant-young fifth member Jim O'Rourke, was noticeably direct and tuneful—but not, as it turned out, concise (eight of 10 tracks over five minutes), nor as bracingly aggressive as Goo or Dirty or Daydream Nation. Excellent, but hedged. On Ripped, seven of 12 tracks clock in under four minutes, and three more under five. But the radical departure is the new album's appearance of simplicity, especially regarding what means most with these guys: guitar sound.

Most SY guitars are thick, dirty, doubled, the better to amplify and complicate the weird scales that underlie music you can get lost in and quite often hum. On Rather Ripped, however, guitars are cleanly articulated, given over to tunelets and quasi-arpeggios that cycle through the songs like the good little hooks they are, so much so that when Moore and Ranaldo clash and rumble old-style—two minutes into "Sleepin' Around," on the Ranaldo horror movie "Rats," or the Gordon reverie "Turquoise Boy"—the effect is a reassuring return to normalcy. In other words, the Brechtian distance their dissonances stopped guaranteeing long ago is provided instead by super-catchy mock-pop devices—which eventually, sly devils, prove stranger harmonically than first impressions suggest. The singing, while not even mock pop—by normal standards of vocal intonation and soulful drama, this may be the least gifted great band ever—nudges their recitative tendencies toward a sweet, breathy, sincere counterpart of the guitars. Simple word choices and frequent repetitions make lyrics whose meaning never comes clear seem just out of reach.

All of which I find pretty exhilarating. Of course, you may not. When Murray Street came out in 2002, non-old Amy Phillips notoriously asserted in this very newspaper that since Sonic Youth hadn't made a good album since (1995's) Washing Machine, they should break up already. Who's to say her opinion isn't worth as much as mine? Me? Well, yeah. One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.

One technique, which I've just illustrated, is to replace response reports ("boring" and all its self-involved pals, like my "exhilarating" or Phillips's less blatant "dull") with stimulus reports. Here's another instance: Boring or not, 1998's A Thousand Leaves unquestionably marked a turn toward the quietude, ruminative structures, and general fuzz level always implicit in their unresolved tunings and Deadhead-manquéjams—tendencies tersely deployed on 1994's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star and fulsomely indulged on Washing Machine's sandbagging 20-minute "The Diamond Sea." On Leaves, melodies were softer, lyrics kinder, instrumentals more atmospheric, and 2000's NYC Ghosts & Flowers ran away with the freer tendencies of that approach. But ever since then, starting withMurray Street and working through Sonic Nurse and now Rather Ripped, Sonic Youth have reinvested in songform. It's so much more reliable than a 401(k).

Another objectivity aid is consensus, as indicated by record guides, online compendia, and of course critics polls. These establish that Murray Street is well liked, A Thousand Leaves and Sonic Nurse only a little less so. The dud by acclamation (perhaps even the "bad album" whose existence I deny) is NYC Ghosts, which Phillips acknowledges as the true inspiration for her kill-yr-idols hissy fit. Granted an excuse to replay every Sonic Youth album I own, I've found these judgments justifiable. Murray's song-soundscape fusion, which at the time I didn't quite get, sounded strong, while NYC Ghosts, whose meanderings had captivated me in their ambiently environmental way, never fully reconnected. Leaves, long my eccentric fave, proved marginally less entrancing as it sopped up its 74 minutes under lyric-parsing scrutiny. I'm disappointed in myself—I take pride in knowing when I've reconciled taste and judgment, and don't often get records wrong. But I still think the consensus is too extreme—and probably, given the way these things go, reactive, pumping Murray Street to make up for dismissing NYC Ghosts.