Bleep

Kim Gordon has been an arbiter of underground for well over 5 decades now, and her second solo LP The Collective proves she’s still got her finger on the pulse. Stomach churning noise, blissed out alt rock, progressive electronica, glacial ambience, acid fried film scoring, Gordon has tried her hand at, and made beautiful, challenging art within these disciplines and many more in the time since Sonic Youth disbanded, but maybe never before has she distilled them all into a masterwork quite like this. The key to The Collective lies within the blunted and serrated trap of ‘BYE BYE’ in which she lays charismatically bored lines over a beat that draws a fine line between downtown art scuzz and trunk rattling rage rap. Matador runs a victory lap at the tail end of the year here with a deluxe edition that adds two more bruising numbers to the fold. ‘Bangin’ On The Freeway’ especially stuns with its metal pipe percussion and kick drums that seem to run forward, backward, and side to side to match her off-beat proclamations.