Is It Out Of Touch Or Is It The Touch?

Sonic Youth “Fire Engine Dream” – Unlike most odds-and-sods collections, Sonic Youth’s the Destroyed Room bypasses any pretense of completism in the interest of crafting a cohesive album from somewhat disparate source material as well as making sure that enough strong material is available for future reissues of their back catalog. Aside from a few tracks dating back to the mid-90s, the record is focused mainly on selections from the fertile O’Rourke era. Along with two other tracks on the Destroyed Room, album opener “Fire Engine Dream” is an outtake from 2004’s Sonic Nurse, though its narrative, horizontal sprawl comes closer to the sound of 2001’s underrated “Free City Rhymes” than anything from its musically strong yet creatively unambitious period. Though there’s certainly nothing wrong with the way “Reena,” “Pattern Recognition” and “The Empty Page” toss the listener immediately into the three most recent Sonic Youth albums, I definitely prefer this sort of cinematic world-building opener from the band. (Click here to buy it from Amp Camp.)

Spank Rock “Rick Rubin (White Girl Lust remix)” – Though it’s most likely unintentional, White Girl Lust somehow manage to twist Spank Rock’s backpacker banger into some sort of jingle bell rocker by replacing its electro grind with a sequence of perky sampled hooks that twinkle like Christmas lights and evoke a room full of drunk co-workers and awkward, ill-advised mistletoe maneuvers. (Click here to buy the original from Bleep/Big Dada, and here for the White Girl Lust MySpace page.)

Elsewhere: An impossibly twee Portland band (seriously, these guys make Colin Meloy seem rough and tumble) has a rough time in DC, thus sparking a fascinating/depressing comments thread on DCist that vacillates wildly between reactionary (and often blatantly racist) bullshitting and insightful commentary from residents of the District.

Also: “The record is capped with a cute Murphy-turn in the album closer “New York I Love You,” a little bit of Ben Folds-y piano lament.” This is ironic because Murphy is a guy who came to fame on the strength of a song that expressed a freakishly huge frame of reference, and now he’s getting reviewed by a generation of people for whom piano balladry = BEN FOLDS and disco = JAMES MURPHY.