Rather Ripped
Latest album from the legendary NYC band is also its tautest, a record full of propulsive, three-minute art-pop songs.
Even back in the days of EVOL, what set Sonic Youth apart from their hardcore and post-hardcore peers was an innate sense of sophistication that had them surrounding aggressive noise with lyrical washes of sound. So it isn't too strange to describe Rather Ripped as Sonic Youth's "prettiest" album to date. The loss of…
Considering that Sonic Youth lost Jim O'Rourke and found the custom-tweaked, irreplaceable guitars that were stolen in 1999 before heading into the studio to make Rather Ripped, it seemed that the album could be a big departure from what they'd been doing on Murray Street and Sonic Nurse -- possibly a return to the kind of music they could only make with those instruments, or perhaps an entirely different approach that reflected their revamped, old-is-new-again lineup.
Rather Ripped continues with the mellow, poppy vibes that Sonic Youth started emphasizing on 2002’s Murray Street.