'Murray Street' is NYC's Sonic Youth's sixteenth album proper or so - they've amassed such a catalogue of major releases and sideline experiments that even their press agents seem to find it hard to keep track. It's been out about a year now but I'm still finding new sounds there when I listen to it.

'Dirty' was NYC's Sonic Youth's ninth album proper or so. It came out in 1992 and now it's here again as a catalogue of a major release and the sideline experiments that led to its creation. They've always been finding new sounds.

Dirty
'Dirty' combines jerky song structures loose like stacked cards, lyrics spat politically and in a popular vein; "I love you, sugar kane." The album was recorded after a year of touring that involved Sonic Youth supporting classic rocker Neil Young and the pre-'Nevermind' Nirvana supporting Sonic Youth, and produced with 'Nevermind's team. You can sort of tell.

'Dirty' pulled a new fashionable band T-shirt over an old-young sweaty gut and shook up the dance floor something rotten and good. Onwards from the classic opening '100%', melody squeezed through a vice, the album is angry and powerful, yet tuneful. Accessible and at times horrible. It's great fun. The band sound so up-for-it throughout. Deadpan or detached vocals are displaced by Thurston's improvised shouts on hardcore cover 'Nic Fit'; storyteller Lee is even moved to "come on, scream!" in the surprising howl of 'Wish Fulfillment'. Kim Gordon's pure (dirty) vocal grimace is at its best here. Swimsuit Issue' describes a record exec jacking off, in what the words are and how the words are said. Imagine Patti Smith raging in song at Bono when he called her a "godmother of punk" and you'd still be hardly near 'Orange Rolls, Angels Spit'. It's spit alright…

I love to follow the songs on this album. It's hard to remember what comes next and only sometimes can you predict it. Sonic Youth were never about verse-chorus-verse, they bend the structure, crumple, burn it. 'Theresa's Sound World' unfolds like slow paper, Fugazi's Ian MacKaye scribbles mad delight in 'Youth Against Fascism', 'Crème Brulee' mangles a folksy rhyme pattern. 'Chapel Hill' wraps up the way I want it: for those moments of melody pushed down like revelers in a moshpit by a heavy lunging fool of distortion. It's like Ren & Stimpy in a way, all warped extremes.

But people knew this back in 1992 (number one in the alternative chart, baby). The extra material lets us see how explorations arrived at all that. B-side 'Genetic' is one of the most song-based tracks; the instrumental rehearsal recordings are there for any die-hard improv fans who found the original 'Dirty' too commercial. The guitars are abrasive enough even without Kim's vocal! It's interesting in parts to hear how loose they can be and to find how the final songs developed, the drum machine version of 'Wish Fulfillment' especially, but most of these workouts don't demand full attention. The song and the music work best in combination. CD2 is definitely worth getting, though, for a couple of great covers, Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls. 'Personality Crisis' has a moment in the middle of this mostly acoustic singalong where the electric guitar just has to puke! That's what I love about Sonic Youth.

'Murray Street'
Trips like 'Daydream Nation' and 'Dirty' having taken the pop song into a noisy and dark a territory as major labeldom seems to allow, Sonic Youth now go the other way and hammer their noise into melodic submission. That is, there's plenty of tune here but laid over a frame that doesn't have any borders; the first track's even called 'The Empty Page' just to hint at that freedom. Mm, arty. These people have more abstracts than their local Guggenheim.

This freedom isn't militant. The album as a whole seems quite relaxed; despite the occasional sense of foreboding - 'Karen' build-ups from a nice-enough pop song ("you smell of memory" ) to the sound of five detuned radios used as drumsticks, a bit like the end of 'On the Strip', actually - there is always an accompaniment of wonder. In 'Disconnection Notice', distended guitars screech at a friendly bass, like an alien meeting a babby. The eight-minute 'Rain on Tin' is a day at the beach with a lot going on in it and at the same time nothing much in the middle. You've had a great day, you buy a postcard for your mum but have nothing to write on it, except for a threat of storm in the middle amongst lots of nifty guitar noodlings. The warm hum of the closing track has a psychedelic and intense repetition you never want to end… unless you don't like it. It all tramples over the awkward moments of the last Youth album 'NYC Ghosts & Flowers'. If it doesn't approach the catching force of their more pop records, it does have a scary power in its discord and acceleration, and keeps its personality even in deep layers of industrial Godspeed drone, and reveals itself given patience. There's a gracefulness to the album that slides it comfortably into the Sonic Youth catalogue and makes it just as essential to hear as the other fifteen or so.

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