Sightings

Related Content

• How To Get The Band To Play What You Want
  May 25, 2011
• Tune-Yards, Citay, Among DIY Artists Who Celebrate Our Band Could Be Your Life Anniversary: Listen
  May 23, 2011
• The Wizard of Wilco: A Conversation with Guitarist Nels Cline
  January 25, 2012
• Album of the Year: Handicapping the Race for the Best Record of 2011
  October 27, 2011
• Audiovisual Hallucination
  December 22, 2010

More About

• Sonic Youth
• Electronic Music
• Dance Reviews

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Some tin-eared critics will write, "Hey dude, Sightings is the new noise." Do not believe this chicanery. Sightings is an extremely dissonant dance band. In fact, it is the first hybrid of Confusion Is Sex-era Sonic Youth white-noise and subatomically designed minimal techno. The eight tracks that comprise this new jam -- the NYC trio's fourth and best studio release -- are true 21st-century tribal grooves flickering rhythmically like a faulty tube of frosty-blue fluorescent lighting. And Sightings has placed your position, as listener, within that flicker, and that is one violently loud place to be sequestered. From there, the once-distant crackle 'n' hum of electricity feels more like a full-bodied seismic reverberation. Snarling six-string feedback cracks the spine like a whip. The corrosive synthesized drums splash across the face and trickle down the chest, leaving smoking radiation burns. Sightings' nuclear no-wave funk makes my sweat reek like ozone. Listen, this is the new rhythm. This is the new dance. This is the new nervous system.