Sonic Youth - Dirty

Dirty from 1992 was Sonic Youth's ninth album, and the second recorded for DGC / Geffen. They went into the studio with a perhaps unprecedented abundance of material. While Butch Vig's clean but full-bodied production certainly gave Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's guitars greater punch and presence than they had in the past, and many of the songs move in the increasingly tuneful direction the band had been traveling with 'Daydream Nation' and 'Goo', most of 'Dirty' is good bit more jagged and purposefully discordant than its immediate precursors.

If anything, 'Dirty' finds Sonic Youth revisiting the territory the band mapped out on 'Sister' - merging the propulsive structures of rock (both punk and otherwise) with the gorgeous chaos of their approach to the electric guitar - and it shows how much better they'd gotten at it in the past five years, from the curiously beautiful 'Wish Fulfillment' and 'Theresa's Sound World' to the brutal 'Drunken Butterfly' and 'Purr.' 'Dirty' was also Sonic Youth's most overtly political album, railing against the abuses of the Reagan / Bush era on 'Youth Against Fascism,' 'Swimsuit Issue,' and 'Chapel Hill,' a surprising move from a band so often in love with cryptic irony.