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100

Village Voice (Consumer Guide)

Its avant parts are more listenable--nay, beautiful--than anything on Washing Machine if not A Thousand Leaves.

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CDNow

While a little too dense in spots, NYC Ghosts & Flowers is 42 minutes of the most neatly executed pop noir you'll hear.

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MTV.com

Ghosts & Flowers, like Sonic Youth's landmark Daydream Nation album, forces the listener to listen very carefully for subtle moments of beauty amidst the near silence and the absolute chaos.

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Checkout.com

NYC Ghosts & Flowers yields no easy accessibility, as it becomes darker and more abstract by the minute.

Magnet

Doesn't quite reach greatness, but it grows and changes with every listen... [#46, p.92]

New Musical Express

While it captures the contrary, questing essence of Sonic Youth surer than any SY release since 'Washing Machine', it also never betrays the sluggish, arrogant lack of self-editing that made '98's 'A Thousand Leaves' so bilious and unlovable, and the band's self-released 'SYR' EPs so hit and miss.

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Alternative Press (Record Of The Week)

A dark, nervous-sounding album, a demanding and disruptive listen that only grows thornier over its 45-minute duration.

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Ink Blot Magazine

Closer than any previous mass-market Sonic Youth album to the avant-garde sound that's always popped up in their extracurricular work.

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Wall of Sound

The band members unleash meditative, self-consciously poetic jams, solidifying their status as the hipster's Phish.

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Salon.com

The unruly, bad-dream aftertaste of this material echoes the quartet's early records from the 1980s... Even while there isn't a single song here that holds together from beginning to end, even as the music makes only itself felt in halting jigsaw fashion... the album has a gloomy, unaccommodating tenacity that's hard to shake.

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Sonicnet

Certain moments find the quartet keying in on the same fugal intertwining of beauty and dissonance that Television explored back in the late 1970s.

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Billboard

The collection either encapsulates Sonic Youth's most endearing or annoying qualities, depending on how one feels about the band and the spoken-word poetics from Kim Gordon.

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Mojo

In the end, it's surprisingly worth it for the few great, strange tracks.

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Nude As The News

The big downside is the lyrics.

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All Music Guide

The album lacks the visceral, immediate impact of the best beat poetry and frequently seems fueled by self-consciousness instead of stream-of-consciousness.

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The Onion (A.V. Club)

But the album as a whole--which, at eight songs in 42 minutes, barely exceeds EP length--is woefully uneven, with producer Jim O'Rourke indulging the band in some truly ill-conceived whims.

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Select

The songs suffer from a lazy approach and the relentless repetition of unengaging chord patterns. [July 2000, p.106]

Pitchfork

An unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest hell.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this album is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 9 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Joe gave it an8:
A good album. Not perfect but definitely interesting, a great record for Sonic Youth.

S R. gave it a7:
Its sonic youth, take it or leave it. that pitchfork 'review' shouldn't be counted. there are very very few albums ever that deserve a 0 and this certainly isn't one of them. scumbags.

Jon L gave it a5:
Some cool, interesting tracks where the beat approach actually works (usually Ranaldo's stuff), but most of it is dull or just embarrassing. Unless Ranaldo's writing it all, it's better for them to just hint at this approach rather than attack it outright.

Chronic Ruth gave it a10:
I haven't heard this one. But Sonic Youth is a real good bad with mostly real good songs. I like it when they just play and play too. Sometimes it seems like maybe just noise or something. That's awesome! I think this album will be real good and you should buy it. I mean who are you to not like a Sonic Youth record? They are like elders in a culture of depravity and utter seriousness. Stare them down and you see yourself, naked, hallucinating in a ditch, imaging that you are a strung rock star, teetering on the edge of the world , with something important left to say, that the public has yet to wrestle, yet to rescue from your mind, and in just one magic second, you will speak your final peace. Now. Sex is death. Such dedication forewarns of a life that is doomed to end in repeat.

Gustavo A gave it a10:
You have to close your eyes and let the music takes you to unknown places. Its UNIQUE

Marcus G gave it a 10:
An incredibly iconoclastic arc of 8 non-songs that has to be their most perfect album. The city is their sole muse but the result is no utopia. There's loss and longing and there's protest. But when that is what sets off the sparks, you are thankful for all the concrete that must become cracked, awe-struck by the histories that have to haunt us. This work is focused, heartfelt, and strangely elegant. It may not be their rockingest best. Any of the tracks laid out on their own suffer more than the band's previous singles and NYCG&F will not create many converts. Still, this release is a pinnacle achievement at the outset of their New York City trilogy of recordings and a strong claim that when it comes to urban noise nobody does it better.

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