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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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A dark, nervous-sounding album, a demanding and disruptive listen that only grows thornier over its 45-minute duration.
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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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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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Checkout.comNYC Ghosts & Flowers yields no easy accessibility, as it becomes darker and more abstract by the minute.
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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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MagnetDoesn't quite reach greatness, but it grows and changes with every listen... [#46, p.92]
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In the end, it's surprisingly worth it for the few great, strange tracks.
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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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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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The big downside is the lyrics.
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An unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest hell.
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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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SelectThe songs suffer from a lazy approach and the relentless repetition of unengaging chord patterns. [July 2000, p.106]
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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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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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Its avant parts are more listenable--nay, beautiful--than anything on Washing Machine if not A Thousand Leaves.
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The band members unleash meditative, self-consciously poetic jams, solidifying their status as the hipster's Phish.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 22
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Mixed: 1 out of 22
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Negative: 5 out of 22
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JoeMay 24, 2009A good album. Not perfect but definitely interesting, a great record for Sonic Youth.
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SR.Sep 23, 2007
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JonLJul 23, 2007