Expressway to Yr. Skull

This is one of the longest commitments rock music will ask of you, and it earns every minute. What begins as a mid-tempo song with a particular warmth — almost tender in its opening guitar work, Moore's voice more melodic here than in most of their catalog — gradually unmoors itself from conventional structure and drifts into pure sonic exploration. The transition is so slow you almost don't notice it happening: the chord changes become less frequent, the vocals fall away, and the guitars begin to speak a different language, one built on sustained feedback, harmonics, and the slow manipulation of sustain. By the twenty-minute mark, the song has become something closer to an installation than a composition — sheets of sound overlapping and shifting like weather systems. There is real beauty in it, not the easy beauty of a polished arrangement but the beauty of something enormous and indifferent, like standing at the edge of an ocean at night. It belongs to Sonic Youth's early Geffen period, when they had major-label resources but not a single commercial instinct to spend them on. You reach for this song when you want to dissolve — when the boundaries between yourself and what you're listening to feel like a problem that music might solve.