Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth's best album in years finds the band at their most melodic, creating strong, elliptical songs with plenty of guitar blasts and deep-space freak-outs. Familiar territory for them, to be sure -- but the dueling lead guitars and crisp complexity sound new again. This album was rated #10 in our Best of 2002 poll.

How do you respond to unnatural disaster? That question is a prime motivator for Sonic
Youth. In the Eighties the band rose from punk and postmodernism to survey the battered
beauty of late-century civilization, gravitating toward such subjects as teen angst and serial
killers, artfully jacking in to the world's confusion. Most of all, Sonic Youth rose from New
York, their detuned guitar harmonies minding the gap between subways and sk... More >

The diligently realized sound of exhaustion ("Sympathy for the Strawberry," "Rain on Tin") (Grade - ***)