NYC Ghosts & Flowers

NYC Ghosts & Flowers
Studio album by Sonic Youth
Released	May 16, 2000
Recorded	August 1999 – February 2000 in New York City, United States
Genre	Noise rock, experimental rock
Length	42:18
Label	DGC
Producer	Sonic Youth, Jim O'Rourke
Sonic Youth chronology
SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century (1999)SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century1999 NYC Ghosts & Flowers (2000) SYR5 (2000)SYR52000

NYC Ghosts & Flowers is the 11th studio album by American noise rock/alternative rock band Sonic Youth. It was released on May 16, 2000 by record label DGC. The album was very experimental and can be considered as a reaction to the theft of their instruments in July 1999, in which many irreplaceable guitars and effects pedals were stolen. This is also the first album since Bad Moon Rising in which Sonic Youth used John Cage-like prepared guitar, for example using a bicycle horn between the strings on Lightnin, a lime between the strings and the first pickup and a file inserted over the neck pickup on Small Flowers Crack Concrete and a drum stick between the strings in Free City Rhymes.

Background

As a result of the theft, the members of Sonic Youth relied upon "old guitars in their studio, unearthing instruments they hadn't used in years" which "along with equipment purchased to fulfill the remaining [...] dates [of the tour], would serve as the foundation for six new songs written over the next month", in addition to "Free City Rhymes" and "Renegade Princess", which were written prior to the tour. The band members later acknowledged that "the gear theft was somewhat of a blessing, if not a rather unwelcome and unpleasant one, in that it truly forced them to 'start over' and approach creating music with brand new boundaries".^[1]

Content

On this album, the influence of beat poetry on the band was strongly evident: The lyrics to most songs resembled the beat style; Lenny Bruce and D. A. Levy were name-checked; and the cover art was based on a painting by William S. Burroughs.

Release

NYC Ghosts & Flowers was released on May 16, 2000 by record label DGC.^[1]

A music video was released for the track "Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)". According to the band's official website, it was a proposed single that "never actually found its way into stores."^[1]

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	66/100[2]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[3]
Alternative Press	3/5[4]
Blender	[5]
Entertainment Weekly	B[6]
The Guardian	[7]
NME	8/10[8]
Pitchfork	0.0/10[9]
Rolling Stone	[10]
Spin	8/10[11]
The Village Voice	A[12]

NYC Ghosts & Flowers received an approval rating of 66 out of 100 on review aggregator website Metacritic, signifying "generally favorable reviews".^[2] In a positive review for the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot said "though Sonic Youth flirted with alternative-rock songcraft in the early '90s, these noise-rock renegades are once again happily viewing their guitars as hunks of wood, wire and infinite possibility." He went on to write, "No rock band makes the avant-garde sound quite this tactile and sensual."^[13] Salon.com also gave the album a positive review and stated, "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."^[14] Mojo stated that "in the end, it's surprisingly worth it for the few great, strange tracks."^[2] In Spin, Douglas Wolk hailed it as Sonic Youth's "artiest, most texturally spectacular album" yet, writing that it "fashions a link between the free-jazz of the New York Art Quartet and the psychotic spasms of 1978's no wave grail, No New York."^[11] In NME's opinion, the album "burns with such a sense of direction and focus" that revealed the group to still be "a vital creative force" in music.^[8]

According to Robert Christgau, NYC Ghosts & Flowers proved to be Sonic Youth's "dud by acclamation" among critics; he himself had given it a positive review in The Village Voice but later said the record's "meanderings", which had "captivated me in their ambiently environmental way, never fully reconnected" on later listens.^[15] Select wrote that "the songs suffer from a lazy approach and the relentless repetition of unengaging chord patterns."^[2] Billboard believed the record "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."^[16] Brent DiCrescenzo's review for Pitchfork was far more critical and assigned the album a score of 0.0 out of 10, with the critic panning it as "an unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest Hell." Commenting on the album's avant-garde roots, he said, "These are not new ideas. These are ideas that were arrogant and unlistenable upon birth thirty years ago."^[9] DiCrescenzo later reevaluated his opinion of the album and, in 2013, remarked on the higher esteem with which he now held it: "I now love the record. It's unlike anything else; eerie and beautiful. [...] No, the lesson here is: beware the opinions of a kid right out of college." He also described Pitchfork's decimal scale as "knowingly silly" and "arbitrary".^[17]

Track listing

All tracks written by Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley).

Charts

Personnel

References