Dirty (Deluxe Edition)

Hardcore Youth heads will always cleave to the sacred artefacts that are Daydream Nation and Evol, but this listener always thought Dirty a renegade genius. Released in the post-Teen Sprit world of 1992, the record might have seemed a calculated attempt to translate kudos into cash, employing as it did the team of Butch Vig and Andy Wallace, both hot off the back of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Funny thing is, Nirvana only signed to the Geffen label and Gold Mountain management ’cos the Youth had made it okay in their heads. One hand washed the other.

Anyway, the Dirty album proper hasn’t dated one second: Vig and Wallace had keen radar when it came to knowing just how much to sugarcoat the Sonics’ dissonant assault without compromising on raw power (and Vig’s ear for a jagged hook made tunes like ‘100%’ and ‘Youth Against Fascism’ unlikely radio fodder), while the field-of-poppies shimmer of ‘Theresa’s Soundworld’ remains one of their all-time great performances.

The overflow, included here on the extra disc, offers cartographic clues to where they would go over the next decade, drifting away from iconographic/classic punk, Marie Celeste style, into post-rock improvisational straits. There are, of course, kitsch moments – Kim Gordon’s reading of ‘Personality Crisis’ owes as much to the Bay City Rollers as the New York Dolls. But there are also tracks like ‘Tamra’, blueprints for the sounds and colours they would develop through albums like Washing Machine and A Thousand Leaves and had damn near perfected by last year’s Murray Street album and tour. Furthermore, the eleven rehearsal recordings yield works-in-progress like ‘Lite Damage’ and ‘Dreamfinger’, which utilised sounds as creepy and elemental as the corn in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs.

Sonic Youth remain rock ‘n’ roll’s finest action painters. If you’re interested enough to hazard a look at their rough canvases and works in progress, invest in this.