Sister is the moment the band broke out and perfected themselves.

The joy of Girl in a Band is in witnessing an artist unpack and interpret the experiences of her life as she looks back on them.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]In the beginning was not the word, but a drone: a tone to form the backdrop for all the sounds that followed. Some of those later voices may vie for attention, assert their individuality against the cosmic hum, but eventually they surrender and rejoin its embrace. The Best Day is a celebration of that drone and the rich textures …

[xrr rating=2.75/5]It’s time to move into the acceptance stage: Sonic Youth ain’t comin’ back, folks. When the split between Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore was first announced, everyone in the band was deliberately coy about what it meant for the future of Sonic Youth, an understandable stance given the highly personal nature of the problem. This wasn’t some emergence of …

[xrr rating=3.25/5]With Sonic Youth on indefinite (perhaps permanent) hiatus, it’s encouraging to see guitarist Thurston Moore fronting a new band as an outlet for his goofily intellectual brand of post-punk rock music. Born out of a touring group assembled to promote his pastoral, semi-acoustic solo album Demolished Thoughts in 2011, bassist/violinist Samara Lubelski, second guitarist Keith Wood and drummer John …

In the mid-‘80s, SST was the preeminent independent record label, with an impressive roster of bands who arose out of the hardcore punk subculture to define a uniquely American form of guitar-based rock music. Originally formed as an outlet for the owners’ own band, the legendary Black Flag, by 1985 SST was putting out groundbreaking albums by the likes of …

[xrr rating=3.5/5]“I don’t know that much about ‘em.” It’s such a casual statement, heard clearly within the morass of crowd chatter at the very beginning of Smart Bar Chicago 1985, the recently released live album that documents Sonic Youth in a fairly early performance. As the guy says it, the purveyors of blistering noise as amazing, deconstructionist music are already …

[xrr rating=3.25/5]Even as third in the Sonic Youth songwriting hierarchy, we’ve had an inordinate amount of time to get to know Lee Ranaldo. Thirty years in fact. But his two song average on any given SY record notwithstanding, Ranaldo has remained arguably the most elusive member of the group, even as he’s been the most consistently forthright and lucid when …

Sonic Youth The Eternal Rating: 4.0 Label: Matador Records Sometimes par for the course is all that’s needed. Sonic Youth have created a comfortable niche with their past decade of subdued, and often lush, releases. As expected, The Eternal continues this welcome-with-open-arms trend with another bout of playfully grounded songs that balance their early experimental roots with this mature sound …