Even back in the days of EVOL, what set Sonic Youth apart from their hardcore and post-hardcore peers was an innate sense of sophistication that had them surrounding aggressive noise with lyrical washes of sound. So it isn't too strange to describe Rather Ripped as Sonic Youth's "prettiest" album to date. The loss of multi-instrumentalist Jim O'Rourke—who added color and shape to the jammy Murray Street and Sonic Nurse—hasn't sent the band scrambling back to its old habits of clang and scrape. Instead, the new record opens with "Reena," a tight, minor-key piece of guitar-pop that features an echo-y guitar lick as classic as a Cadillac.