Sonic Youth

The band really began to make something beyond just underground rock on this 1986 album. Songs began to get a bit more cohesive and more sprawling. This is where they begin to get important. This is also the first album to feature Steve Shelley on drums. "Star Power" and "Expressway to Yr Skull" on their own are reason enough to start a band.

By deigning to play a few tunes and eschewing both dirge and breakdown for minutes at a time, these media heroes work up a credible representation of the avant-porn clichés that mean so much to them--you know, passion as self-immolation, life redeemed on the edge of death, and (last but not least) it was only a dream. The deliberately stoopid title, misspelled frontwards and misapprehended backwards, captures the loopy tone they've achieved. In fact, the good parts are so good that for a while there I thought I was enjoying the bad parts. Guess I must have been woolgathering. (Grade - B+)