Growing old gracefully

In a musical climate characterised by ever-changing fads and fashions, there can be few more prized achievements for a band than attaining longevity. But longevity brings its own problems. How to retain dignity without becoming obsolete? How to avoid becoming a self-parody? How to move on with the times without looking like desperate bandwagon-jumpers?

Sonic Nurse is Sonic Youth's nineteenth LP in a career spanning well over twenty years. They may still be sonic, but they're far from being youthful.

Their albums attest to continual shifts of focus and direction, the band never content to rest on their laurels and always keen to try something different and novel whilst avoiding being overly influenced by short-lived fads. And yet their oeuvre nevertheless seems to have a consistent thread running through it. As Thurston Moore has claimed, they have become one of the ultimate reference points - a music journalist or reviewer only has to describe something as "Sonic Youthy" and the majority of readers know what this means. Sonic Youth have a sound that others may try to ape, but nobody does it better.

The band themselves might claim Sonic Nurse sounds like "'Bare Trees' era Fleetwood Mac jamming with 'Jealous Again' era Black Flag", but really it sounds like no-one else but Sonic Youth, a frequently glorious distillation of all that has gone before.

However, therein lies the cause for concern. Sonic Nurse might be an improvement on 2002's Murray Street (there's more of it, for a start), but it's the first Sonic Youth album that conspicuously follows in the footsteps of its predecessor.

The change in direction between 2000's defiantly awkward and abstract NYC Ghosts & Flowers (which saw them coming almost full-circle from 1985's Bad Moon Rising) and its follow-up, Murray Street - a retreat from the brink of experimentation - perhaps signalled that they'd decided their envelope-pushing days were now behind them. Or perhaps, to be more charitable, they acknowledged that as a rock band, their primary duty is to rock.

To suggest that a band is treading water might be a damning criticism of anyone else, but here there is so much to enjoy and admire in the heart-meltingly gorgeous dissonance of 'Pattern Recognition', 'Paper Cup Exit' and 'Stones' that any real sense of disappointment is quickly assuaged. And yet, after years at the cutting edge, they do seem to have finally settled into a comfortable and familiar groove.

So, their relevance as an ongoing concern might be coming into question, and they might not have anything startlingly new to offer, but at least they're growing old in the most graceful way imaginable and my love for them remains unconditional.

Of course, album number twenty could quite easily render all these reflections redundant...