Waterloo Records

Reviews:

Rock's longest-running great band doesn't break any new ground on its 14th or 18th album (depending on whether you count their releases on their indie imprint SYR). That's because they don't have to. Instead, like 1998's A Thousand Leaves and 2000's NYC Ghosts & Flowers, Murray Street uses its gnarly noises to explore the nuances of laying around and watching the world turn rather than as pathways to the unrelenting forward momentum that fired their earlier work. The Kim Gordon-sung "Plastic Sun," a brief punk raver, is the anomaly; more typical is "Karen Revisited," which nods to both Goo's "Tunic (Song for Karen)" and Leaves' "Karen Koltrane." At 11 minutes it's both the longest and best song on the album, an elliptical Lee Ranaldo-sung story-song that dissolves into a gorgeous electrical-storm aural minefield. And so it goes: SY's approach to both traditional rock songs and hazed-out experimentica is so fully its own they can sound both tossed-off and masterful.