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100Sonic Nurse could be the best guitar rock album since, well, Murray St.
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100‘Nurse’ is the closest to creating a landmark on parallel with ‘Daydream Nation’ they’ve come since that particular record's nameday in ‘88, and in it’s dense textures it maybe signals the extinction of the antediluvian No Wave idyll; a Robert Zimmerman trip that somehow got mixed up with Joni Mitchell, Black Flag and a conceptualist oddball.
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This unusually songful set is well up among their late good ones, its dissonances a lingua franca deployed less atmospherically than has been their recent practice.
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No big revelations, but plenty of rewards. [11 Jun 2004, p.123]
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90A gorgeous, bona fide gem. [#11, p.92]
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Every song but one falls fully developed in the five- to seven-minute ballpark, brimming with enough dissonant wizardry, smart vocal imagery, and tonal shades of rock to fly the freak flag like no aging rockers ever have.
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85While Sonic Nurse isn't quite as strong as its predecessor, it's equally as imbued with instrumental dexterity and impressively coherent ideas.
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80What emerges is Sonic Youth at complete ease with themselves and their music, operating simultaneously at the peak of their powers and with a powerful, audacious restraint.
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If 1992's Dirty caught the grunge zeitgeist, Nurse might capture something of indie rock's recent taste for emotional epics. [#7]
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Sonic Nurse, if not proof of a band bursting with fresh ideas, is at least fresh-sounding.
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80The Youth sound rejuvenated. [Jul 2004, p.108]
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80Their most songful release since the major-label hellos Goo and Dirty, and by most standards their best since 1988's pivotal Daydream Nation. [#27, p.144]
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80The krang of album’s past seems more an afterthought as the band explores the natural textures of layered guitar and lumbering bass tracks.
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All told, this album is probably the band's best balance of pop melodies and avant-leaning structures since Washing Machine; even if it doesn't rank among their most ambitious work, Sonic Nurse sounds like the kind of album Sonic Youth should be making at this point in their career.
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80Sonic Nurse finds them embracing and sifting through the finer moments of their past over the course of 10 outstanding tracks.
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Sonic Nurse is the happy medium they've been craving. The songs, despite being mostly over five minutes long, are all to the point without feeling meandering.... The balance between noise and melody is right, with each emerging and vanishing at just the right point.
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On the whole, Sonic Nurse compiles a laid-back hour of elaborate plucking and rhythm from five veteran musicians who reserve musical violence and poetic anger for when it feels most appropriate.
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Percolates the same melancholy satisfaction and nervous maturity, entropy and growth, in and out--but with an urgency and impulsiveness that risks upsetting the balance.
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75This ain't another Daydream Nation, but Nurse is a good cure for what ails the airwaves.
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Sounds like a brilliant album by a lesser band. [5 Jun 2004, p.57]
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70Finds them revelling in bursts of noise and awkwardness, but more surprisingly perhaps, taking as much comfort in sweet melody. [Jul 2004, p.124]
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The guitar feedback... hasn't vanished, yet this is Sonic Youth's most accessible album since 1992's Dirty. [24 Jun 2004, p.175]
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It's [Kim] Gordon's tracks that make the strongest impact.
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Whilst Moore’s meandering stops Sonic Nurse from going that much needed extra mile, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo are on reassuringly good form.
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67A strangely enervated Sonic Youth record, one that exchanges Murray Street's golden-years vigor for a sad sense of duty. [Jul 2004, p.108]
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60Sonic Nurse is not... a classic rock record. And it's not a classic Sonic Youth record. It's an excursion, into corners weird and corners familiar. [Jun 2004, p.100]
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Sonic Nurse is better than 90 percent of new rock, but with younger combos like Lightning Bolt and Liars stealing their thunder, these well-meaning vets come off as old and in the way. [Jul 2004, p.134]
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60Lacks the standout tracks of its predecessors.
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Sonic Nurse neither disappoints nor surpasses expectations.
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60A better-than-average Sonic Youth album. [#64, p.106]
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60The emphasis this time around is on poppier melodies, but for all its attention to song form, Sonic Nurse feels more like a collection of exercises than a cohesive album. [#244, p.63]
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40A fairly average jaunt into familiar indie rock territory.
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Positive: 23 out of 24
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Mixed: 0 out of 24
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Negative: 1 out of 24
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