... about Sonic Youth. Now it's my turn.
If "Murray Street" was your only Sonic Youth album you would be pretty happy with it. It does all the things Sonic Youth albums do, and it does them quite well. But a band like Sonic Youth is not designed to be treated like a comfortable old pair of slippers, and that is what they seem to have become. If you treat "Murray Street" as one of however many post-"Daydream Nation" albums, it is just another inessential footnote. (I do have a particular soft spot for the sprawling "A Thousand Leaves", but aside from that I have to agree with Marcello, it's what he calls the "solid 95th album" thing of too many, too similar, none really hitting a fresh nerve.)
Speaking only for myself, the time when Sonic Youth really mattered was actually quite brief. Everything before "Sister" was too lacking in any recognisable "structure" for me to be able to grab hold of it. Everything after "Daydream Nation", well, see the previous paragraph. (And they moved to Geffen when I was at an age, and of an attitude, when a band doing something like moving to Geffen seemed like an uneraseable Black Mark, so that it wouldn't really have mattered how good "Goo" and "Dirty" were, I wouldn't have been listening. (Which, yes, might well have been my loss, but really, aside from having been put to good use in a couple of Hal Hartley films, I still don't think, even in my "mature" phase, that either album saw the group trying very hard.))
But "Sister" is where they started to figure something out about what they could do with the things they were doing, and "Daydream Nation", which, from the Gerhard Richter cover art to the final fadeout, is sublimely perfect in every way, is why Sonic Youth matter. I cannot praise any album higher than "Daydream Nation", but nor can I write about it because my response to it is outside of language. (And let us also acknowledge "Into The Groove(y)", where the group briefly emerge from their own cocoon and observe, albeit from an "ironic" distance, the world around them.)
They may be a convenient target for those who need targets (and Kim and Thurston may in many ways come across as A Little Bit Too Cool, A Little Bit Too Perfect), but they have their place in history and I don't think anybody can say they haven't earned it.
