SONIC YOUTH | Rather Ripped (Geffen)
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I didn’t get into most of the records avec O’Rourke–just the last one, 2004’s Sonic Nurse, a pastoral, poppy flashback to their early-90s albums that’s rich with creamy guitar tones. I was hoping that Rather Ripped would be deeper damage, a flashback that flashed further back–who doesn’t want SY to make Sister again?–but instead it’s not just poppy but an actual stab at pop. The majority of the songs are three minutes or so, with verse-chorus resolution, and the guitars make with keep-it-simple drones and pretty, tidy harmonies that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Yo La Tengo record.
Still, that kind of thing is only moderately subversive for SY; they were flirting with pop as far back as Evol. Kim and Thurston actually singing, on the other hand–like singing singing, in sweet melodies–is far more curious. Not that Kim suddenly sounds like Anne Murray–she’s using the voice she had hidden behind her breathy, growly coo all along. At any rate she sounds more natural than Thurston, who’s doing puberty soul in middle age: on “Do You Believe in Rapture?” he comes across, probably on purpose, like a creepy teenager spitting lines he picked up from “The Jim Jones Guide to Getting Chicks.” (Lee Ranaldo fans, rest assured: he sounds the same as always.)
Like her scenemate Arto Lindsay of DNA, Descloux soon began to pull inspiration from the tropics, and with her next record, Mambo Nassau (Ze, 1981), she dived headlong into Brazilian, West African, and Jamaican music, coloring it all with downtown dissonance. Her subsequent albums are clashes of traditional French and reggae sounds (dub + accordions = magic) and percussive, synthetic worldbeat. Best Off skims some of the goodest goods from Descloux’s six full-lengths, including the last, recorded in 1995 and finally scheduled for release this fall as The Lost Album. Any distillation of her vivid and diverse catalog is bound to be an odd package–it’s hard to imagine fans of the albums that made her a no-wave icon sticking around for the polyglot torch songs that dominate the tail end of her career–but that’s just a testament to her artistic brio.
