Sonic Youth "Rather Ripped" (Geffen)
By Trey Perkins
Wednesday. Jun 14, 12:03 AM
Those who say this band don’t know about music don’t know what they’re talking about.

With their roots firmly planted in the dissonant drone of Glenn Branca and the late ‘70’s / early ‘80s New York No Wave scene, the last thing you’d expect from Sonic Youth are tasteful, melodic guitar solos. To many who’ve enjoyed SY’s willingness to experiment with noise, this might sound like a kick in the teeth. Color me shocked, but Thurston and Lee trade licks like the best of them on their latest release, Rather Ripped. It’s not so much that they’ve shucked the dissonance or shunned the formless, amorphous noise of albums like EVOL or Bad Moon Rising – the dissonance is still there, and for the most part so is the noise – but what separates Rather Ripped from the Sonic Youth efforts that I’m most familiar with is a deliberate and constant effort to organize each track into a solid composition. Its closest companion might be Daydream Nation, where the band melded the noise sound with hummable melodies and galloping grunge rhythm. But even at times, Daydream Nation had its moments of extending explorations in drone. Raucous tracks like “Total Trash” even break down to organized noise.

I’m not arguing that Sonic Youth had a very limited sense of composition, either. They’ve proven that they excel in composing what some might refer to as “organized sound”: “Wild Flower Soul” off of A Thousand Leaves demonstrates this principle perfectly. Over the course of nine minutes, Thurston and company go from mellow guitar strumming to phased out noise and rhythmic vamping. But whereas a composition such as “Wild Flower Soul” takes all of these nine minutes to bottle up and explode, the likes of “Incinerate,” “What a Waste,” and “Reena” are already four alarm fires. The only track that comes close to the extended sound exploration (in terms of time) of Sonic Youth’s past is “Pink Steam,” which clocks in at nearly seven minutes. The rest of the songs on Rather Ripped remain comfortably under the six-minute mark.

Not only are the songs shorter, but they’re more “together” from a compositional stand point. Each riff is well thought out and planned perfectly. To take “What a Waste” as an example, Kim sings the melody (again, another surprise for me to hear Kim’s vocals front and center, serving as a focal point for the song’s energy), “Hey gimme hollow stimulation / it’s so sleazy to be free / let’s invest in dull creation / thrill city cheap legacy.” Under her sighing, sustaining vocals, Thurston (or possibly Lee) picks out a melodic line that counterpoints her sultry voice perfectly. Thurston must be feeding his Jazzmaster through an Electro Harmonix Micro Synthesizer. Each note is then given a Moog-esque bite, complimented by a declining filter sweep so that the guitar signal dies down with the completion of each melodic phrase. Prior to this record, I always held the perception that Lee and Thurston were talented guitar players, but that they employed the guitar for its texture and used it more percussively. On “What a Waste,” the guitar is another voice.

The noisier elements that are so indicative of a Sonic Youth record burst forth during the chorus. Kim breathes out “What a Waste / you’re so chaste / I can’t wait / to taste you face!” as the band churn out a dissonant, atonal groove, intensifying her expectation and twisted emotion. Even further, every phrase and passage occurs right where it should. It’s as if the band anticipated what your ear would expect to hear in these songs. During the chorus of “Incinerate,” Thurston sings as Steve Shelly’s drumming breaks off from a traditional pattern into a raucous tom-and-bass drum breakdown. You begin to think that this is the only passage that belongs AT THAT MOMENT IN THAT SONG. With riffs like these, it’s clear to me that Sonic Youth know a great deal more about music than even their harshest critics are willing to admit.

When taken in sum, Rather Ripped isn’t trying to be just another Sonic Youth album. Astute listeners already have enough collections of the band’s “organized sound.” It’s an achievement for them because they’ve taken the more complex facets of their identity and managed to eek them into three-to-five minute songs that are easily digestible. It’s not a statement from a band that’s well into the quarter-century mark and trying to rope a new audience in by writing cookie cutter pop (aka: Phish). If you’re a fan of Sonic Youth’s extended improvised noise-making, think of it this way: on Rather Ripped, they’ve done more with less. Sure, it’s great to see them stretch their legs, but at the end of the day, if they communicate the same information in three minutes that they could in 10, isn’t that a marked improvement? With a shorter amount of time -– every note counts – Rather Ripped doesn’t run the risk of saying the same thing twice. There is an age to these songs, a mellowness, but the raucous noisy energy that so impressed people 20 years ago is still there: it’s just organized into a song. Rather Ripped may go down in history as a pleasing cycle that many people will appreciate for years to come, old Sonic Youth fans and new alike.
www.sonicyouth.com
www.geffen.com

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Trey Perkins

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