Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Starting with Steve Shelley's basic drum fills before the brightly ringing guitars begin,  matching the drum beats, "Schizophrenia" from Sonic Youth's 1987 album Sister . builds in an orderly fashion that feels loose over Thurston Moore's vocals, slightly recalling the track "Bull in the Heather" from 1994's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.  Chiming guitars answer the drums and bass throughout the song's nearly five-minute running time. Sonic Youth became the masters of this droning guitar dialectic with their different guitar tunings (in this case, F#F#GGAA for Thurston and DDDAA for Lee Renaldo) that they used to build a style and sound that was nearly unique in the early 1980s but meshed well with similar guitar interplay by contemporary indie bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Built to Spill.  After the first vocal part, the song becomes more schizophrenic with squealing, harmonic guitar interplay and minimal cymbals. This continues through ...

15. Panopticon - Roads to the North (Bindrune) Panopticon is the project of Kentucky native Austin  Lunn and combines elements of traditional folk music with Metal, yet never seems like a Black Metal retread as it relies heavily on American musical folk styles. Panopticon's songs are an atmospheric reinvention of where folk and metal might intersect. Some, such as "The Echoes of Disharmonium" are thrashy, guttural metal numbers, while "The Long Road Part 1: One Last Fire is a distortion free traditional bluegrass fiddling interlude that merges with "The Long Road Part 2: Capricious Miles," a seven plus minute melodically epic track more easily than one would suspect. Panopticon makes these transitions look simple, merging heavy music and several American folk forms, including traditional Native American flutes and even banjos with startling clarity. Roads to the North builds on their earlier records and reflects the growth of this interesting amalgamati...