Has Sonic Youth made a bad album since their triumph with EVOL in 1986? Not counting their experimental SYR records, they've made 12 studio albums since then. I make half of them (Sister, Daydream Nation, Dirty, Washing Machine, A Thousand Leaves, and Rather Ripped) outright classics, with another four (Goo, Murray Street, Sonic Nurse, and The Eternal) an output that puts other bands of the period to shame all by itself. That leaves NYC Ghosts and Flowers, which I haven't heard, and does get some negative buzz (if I get my hands on it, I'll post my findings here), and today's entry in my underrated album series. Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star wasn't exactly hated, but reviewers seem to have been utterly confused as to how to approach the album, which led to a lot of mixed reviews.
Allmusic, in a relatively negative (3/5) review, claims that "this record must be considered the closest the group has ever gone to straight-ahead pop/rock." On the other hand, Robert Christgau in a hugely positive (A) review states that "Instead of distilling their weakness for experimental trash into noise-rock that sounds like a million bucks, they apply their skill at major-label compromise to their eternal propensity for experimental trash" - a typically christgauian dense sentence which is arguing (if I'm reading it correctly) something like the opposite of allmusic's claim to "straight-ahead pop-rock" - that it is their major label ode to their experimental roots. Blender's review is negative (3/5), but nevertheless sides with Christgau's take on the experimentality of the record, calling it "a weirdly subdued, even-more-dissonant-than-usual record."
On a different tack, the Rolling Stone reviewer, in a positive (4/5) review claimed that "I wish this disc didn't sound like a cup of mud." Allmusic doesn't know whether to agree or disagree with RS on that one, once referring to "Butch Vig's clean production" but later to the "murky production."
We can perhaps forgive the confusion of reviewers at the time, but Blender and Allmusic both had access to the same information we do: namely "A Thousand Leaves," "Murray Street," and "Rather Ripped." Of course, Blender didn't think too much of those three records either, so at least they are consistent. For the rest of us, who relish the Sonic Youth of the turn of the millenium, Experimental Jet Set sounds like nothing so much as a prescient distillation of many of the ideas they later fleshed out in those three records (as well as others).
I think the confusion from Allmusic and Rolling Stone about the relative dirtiness of the production comes from the fact that it sounds so different from the previous two albums, Dirty and Goo, and from the fact that there is a clear (to me) dissonance between the actual fidelity of production (clean) and the relative distortion of the sounds being captured on tape (murky). Personally, I can't really see the claim of muddy or murky production - it sounds crystal-clear to me, but again, I can place it in a line with A Thousand Leaves and Murray Street, which boast similarly clean production values, while maintaining Thurston's and Lee's oddball guitar sounds.
Aside from the above point, I don't (for once) have a grand unifying scheme to demonstrate the superiority of this album. Instead it's as simple as this: there's not a bad track on the album, and many are prime SY. The highlights for me are "Self-Obsessed and Sexxee," "In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader" (great title), "Skink," and "Bone." Ask me tomorrow, I might have a new favorite. Are these all immediately catchy "pop/rock" songs? No, of course not - it's Sonic Youth. As with all the best SY, they're an interesting combination of intricate yet hooky tunes, dissonant guitar sounds, and nontraditional structures. Just how we like it.
