Sonic Youth EVOL

Sonic Youth: Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo (vocals, guitar); Kim Gordon (vocals, bass); Steve Shelley (drums).By 1986, a still relatively recently formed Sonic Youth was in a time of transition. Born out of the noise of New York's thriving-in-ugliness no wave scene and ensconced in the influence of Glenn Branca's avant-garde guitar experimentalism, the band's early albums slowly morphed from the snotty abrasive clatter of its self-titled EP and spotty first proper LP Confusion Is Sex into a far darker but still somewhat inconsistent merging of haunted song sketches and foreboding noisy atmospheres on second album Bad Moon Rising. EVOL found the band in a similarly eerie mindset, but this time the dark dreaminess of songs like "Tom Violence," the tense instrumental "Death to Our Friends," and the gorgeously restrained "Shadow of a Doubt" are snapped into lockstep clarity by Steve Shelley's precise, tom-heavy drumming. Shelley, still a fresh-faced Michigan transplant to N.Y.C., joined the