Sonic Youth - Dirty - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Deluxe Edition 2 CD set features 35 tracks including b-sides and previously unreleased versions. Sonic Youth's second major-tag album, produced and mixed by Butch Vig and Andy Wallace (a team that had helped turn Nirvana's NEVERMIND multi-platinum) was not the barefaced bid for mainstream acceptance that surly underground souls grumbled about in the pages of fanzines. While Vig and Wallace give guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, bassist Kim Gordon, and phenomenal drummer Steve Shelley a wide-screen panorama for their bizarrely-tuned assaults, DIRTY is probably Sonic Youth's most uncompromising album since 1985's BAD MOON RISING-particularly in the lyrical department. Dropping the deliberate obscurantism, Philip K. Dick references, and smart-alecky snottiness, Sonic Youth brackets a slew of pointed political attacks (InchYouth Against Fascism,Inch InchSwimsuit Issue,Inch and the Jesse Helms-bashing InchChapel HillInch) with two passionate tributes to the band members' murdered friend, Joe Cole (Inch100%Inch and InchJCInch). That DIRTY is Sonic Youth's most commercial-sounding album makes it that much more subversive.