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Sonic Youth
Sonic Nurse
Geffen/UMG

"Hey, little baby breakdown / Button-down baby, you come undone." Apparently Kim Gordon And The Arthur Doyle Hand Cream, one of the standouts on Sonic Youth's 19th album, was originally titled after its subject: Mariah Carey. Presumably cooler heads prevailed, or at least heads that didn't want to get sued, which means that 'Sonic Nurse' won't be overshadowed by a trawl through the civil courts. Instead it can be celebrated as the album which (whisper it quietly) is possibly their most consistently enjoyable bunch of songs since their early 90s "pop" period.

Of course, terms like "pop" are relative when it comes to the 'Youth. Proper fans cite their experimental early albums as their best, but I have to confess that for all of the great moments on the recent likes of 'Washing Machine' and 'Murray Street,' I still keep coming back to the trinity of 'Daydream Nation,' 'Goo' and 'Dirty.' In other words, the ones with the singles.

And it's people who dig the 'Youth most when their songs have chorus' that will be best served here: Kim Gordon's husky non-singing is showcased on the opening Pattern Recognition (a rockin' track that disintegrates into waves of feedback), Kim Gordon And... and the gentle I Love You Golden Blue, while Thurston Moore takes lead on first single Unmade Bed, which starts deceptively low-key (led by some tastefully minimal drumming by the much-underrated Steve Shelley) before building slowly up into a Youthian guitar freakout, while the closing Peace Attacks sounds almost like a Pavement tribute as guitar lines follow Moore's vocal melodies.

While the album's been hailed in pre-release press as being a return to rock, 'Sonic Nurse' ranges between extremes of noise and barely-there guitar feather-touch. It's also the Sonic Youth record that will most likely appeal to those who haven't much cared for Sonic Youth thus far - a hell of an achievement for a band going into their 24th year.

Andrew P Street

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