Sonic Youth Murray Street

Sonic Youth..... You're pleased to have them around still but really they haven't done much worth any salt since Goo I reckon. So the CD was inserted with great fear in to the stereo...... and I actually think it's alright. It's quite poppy and tuneful for them and I think it's the best thing I've heard from 'em since Goo. Yowsers....... Tis good to have the 'Yoof' back in some form. They've got Mr O Rourke now as a full time member. Is there any band he hasn't been in????? Vinyl to follow later on this month I think...

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9/10 Gregor Customer review, 10th March 2018

SY were having a bit of an identity crisis before this came out, but this somehow married all of the SYR releases up to this point with sprinkles of NYC Ghosts & Flowers (criminally underrated btw) and Jim O'Rourke.

Still a refreshing record after all these years, it's a shame we only really have Thurston's records now.

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6/10 The Doc Customer review, 11th July 2016

Not their greatest album by any stretch of the imagination, but this is okay, I guess. The main problem with Sonic Youth for me is that for all the experimentation, they often sound like they're just treading through the same muddy waters; sure, Daydream Nation is an epochal classic, but you could argue that everything they did up to that point was trying to define that sound, and everything they did after was an attempt to try to perfect the formula.

So this has all the usual ingredients - dissonant guitars, weird time signatures and off-key vocals, but it lacks the focus and drive of some of their best work (Goo, for example). If for some bizarre reason you've never heard Sonic Youth and are wondering why everyone's been twattering on about them for thirty years, whatever you do, don't start here, but if you've heard the classics and want to broaden your palette, this is worth a go. Don't be expecting miracles though: Washing Machine - released a full seven years before this, way back in 95 - was their last really great album for me, and it was all downhill from there.