nyc ghosts & flowers
- Sonic Youth
- Band Name: Sonic Youth
- Record Label: Interscope
- Release Date: May 16, 2000
- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
Its avant parts are more listenable--nay, beautiful--than anything on Washing Machine if not A Thousand Leaves.
-
80NYC Ghosts & Flowers yields no easy accessibility, as it becomes darker and more abstract by the minute.
-
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.
-
A dark, nervous-sounding album, a demanding and disruptive listen that only grows thornier over its 45-minute duration.
-
80While a little too dense in spots, NYC Ghosts & Flowers is 42 minutes of the most neatly executed pop noir you'll hear.
-
80Ghosts & 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.
-
80Doesn't quite reach greatness, but it grows and changes with every listen... [#46, p.92]
-
Closer than any previous mass-market Sonic Youth album to the avant-garde sound that's always popped up in their extracurricular work.
-
The band members unleash meditative, self-consciously poetic jams, solidifying their status as the hipster's Phish.
-
70Certain moments find the quartet keying in on the same fugal intertwining of beauty and dissonance that Television explored back in the late 1970s.
-
70The 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.
-
70The 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.
-
60In the end, it's surprisingly worth it for the few great, strange tracks.
-
The big downside is the lyrics.
-
The album lacks the visceral, immediate impact of the best beat poetry and frequently seems fueled by self-consciousness instead of stream-of-consciousness.
-
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.
-
20The songs suffer from a lazy approach and the relentless repetition of unengaging chord patterns. [July 2000, p.106]
-
An unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest hell.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 6 out of 7
-
Mixed: 1 out of 7
-
Negative: 0 out of 7
-
Joe8A good album. Not perfect but definitely interesting, a great record for Sonic Youth.
-
SR.7
-
JonL5