| 100 |
Village Voice (Consumer Guide)
Its avant parts are more listenable--nay, beautiful--than anything on Washing Machine if not A Thousand Leaves.
|
| 80 |
CDNow
While a little too dense in spots, NYC Ghosts & Flowers is 42 minutes of the most neatly executed pop noir you'll hear.
|
| 80 |
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.
|
| 80 |
Checkout.com
NYC Ghosts & Flowers yields no easy accessibility, as it becomes darker and more abstract by the minute.
|
| 80 |
Magnet
Doesn't quite reach greatness, but it grows and changes with every listen... [#46, p.92]
|
| 80 |
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.
|
| 80 |
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.
|
| 80 |
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.
|
| 71 |
Wall of Sound
The band members unleash meditative, self-consciously poetic jams, solidifying their status as the hipster's Phish.
|
| 70 |
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.
|
| 70 |
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.
|
| 70 |
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.
|
| 60 |
Mojo
In the end, it's surprisingly worth it for the few great, strange tracks.
|
| 55 |
Nude As The News
The big downside is the lyrics.
|
| 50 |
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.
|
| 50 |
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.
|
| 20 |
Select
The songs suffer from a lazy approach and the relentless repetition of unengaging chord patterns. [July 2000, p.106]
|
| 0 |
Pitchfork
An unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest hell.
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