When Sonic Youth established their SYR imprint 14 years ago, the gesture symbolized something more than just a veteran act indulging their whims with a vanity label. It represented the point where the idea of Sonic Youth (as boundary-pushing, confrontational guitarrerorists) diverged sharply from their reality (as a steady recording and touring act performing their "120 Minutes"-minted "hits" for the alt-rock kids). And perhaps not coincidentally, the decision to launch SYR as a outlet through which to explore their more abstract ideas came shortly after Sonic Youth's first flirtation with Hollywood, having penned a handful of songs for the Richard Linklater/Eric Bogosian teen-angst document subUrbia.
But while both their subUrbia contributions and their early SYR issue Slaapkamers Met Slagroom yielded material eventually reworked on the band's 1998 Geffen release, A Thousand Leaves, in the decade-plus since, the SYR experiments have turned more imposing and impenetrable (live collaborations with Merzbow; improvised tributes to Stan Brakhage) while the Sonic Youth brand ever more eagerly courts the mainstream (Starbucks-commissioned compilations; "Gossip Girl" cameos). However, the latest SYR marks an attempt to mediate the band's pop-vs.-art dialectic and, much like their subUrbia stint 15 years ago, the meeting ground is a teen flick. True to the series' experimental ethos, SYR9 is a collection of amorphous, atmospheric instrumental song sketches, but created in service to French director Fabrice Gobert's high-school-set mystery, Simon Werner a Disparu (or Lights Out, according to Netflix).
This isn't Sonic Youth's first stab at composing a full-length score, but where previous efforts accompanied low-budget indie (Made in USA) or transgressive art-house fare (Olivier Assayas' Demonlover), Simon Werner a Disparu is an accessible, if elaborately structured, thriller about a series of disappearances at a French high school, featuring an attractive young cast that could've stepped out of any prime-time teen soap on the WB. But beyond the band's facility with ominous soundscapes, there's a tactility to Sonic Youth's music-- scraped guitar strings, vigorously stabbed chords, ghostly amplifier hums-- that easily lends itself to cinematic applications. Though I've not seen the film beyond a few clips on YouTube, the music effectively conjures the film's idyllic suburban high-school setting and the disturbing dramas playing out within in, recalling the California-hippie-dream vs. Manson-family-nightmare dichotomy that informed the band's mid-80s work.
The album comprises expanded and elaborated versions of incidental music crafted for the film, however, even in fleshed-out form, SYR9 can feel frustratingly incomplete, with many pieces coming off as a series of loosely linked fragments lacking an emotional center. The band is liable to shift from chilling sound-effect chicanery to full-power rock-outs to playful piano plinking within a single track, with no internal logic or recurring motifs to tie them together; the most immediately captivating moments (like the motorik surges on "Alice et Simon" and "Chez Yves (Alice et Claire)") tend to dissolve into a vaporous drift just as they're taking hold.
But there are certain passages that-- in keeping with the spirit of the earliest SYR releases-- carry the promise of being developed into something more substantial on the band's next proper album, like the reverberating, melancholic refrain that unites "Les Anges au Piano" and "Theme de Simon", which evoke A Thousand Leaves' beautifully understated ballad "Snare, Girl". (Or perhaps the soundtrack's liberal use of piano portends a new mode of musical exploration for a band that's spent the past 30 years pushing the limits of the guitar.) You can actually hear the refinement process at work in the colossal bonus track "Theme D'Alice", which repositions the woozy, surf-tinged tract first heard on "Dans le Bois/M. Rabier" into an electrifying jam that betrays Sonic Youth's latent Stonesy streak, before an extended, ominous fade-out reasserts the film's grim context. But even if this soundtrack doesn't produce any blueprints for a future Sonic Youth album, it does at least provide the band's newly acquired contingent of Starbuck's impulse purchasers and curious Gossip Girl Googlers with a convenient access point into the band's alternate SYR universe.
