“Murdered Out” Album Review
Kim Gordon
  • 4/5
Reviewed by Jen Dan

Indie rock icon Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head, Glitterbust) unleashes her aggressively abrasive debut single.

Indie rock icon (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head, Glitterbust) creates a majorly cacophonous din on her aggressively and corrosively noisy debut (de)tune.  Gordon has always had a deep-seated discordant streak that shined many a time during her tenure in Sonic Youth, where pent-up feelings were masked by dead-pan vocals and channeled into sonic distortion, immolation, and chaos.  Her penchant for disorienting noise continues as a solo artist.  After the dissolution of Sonic Youth (and divorce from bandmate Thurston Moore), Gordon tried on the music project Glitterbust for size, as well as wrote her memoir, Girl in a Band

“Murdered Out” features Gordon on vocals, guitars, and lyrics and includes Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint on drums.  Gordon views this track as a collaborative endeavor with heavy involvement from Justin Raisen for the mixing and production elements.  Matador Records released the single on September 12th. 

Gordon has stated that her lyrics refer to the “murdered out”, or blacking out, style of vehicles by auto enthusiasts where all forms of identification are erased and the car is painted in a black-on-black color scheme.  It’s something that she saw happening in the lowrider car circles which has now seeped into the mainstream.  What was once a symbol of outsider status is being appropriated by popular culture, and that grates…

…just like the abrasive guitar distortion that buzzes through “Murdered Out”, along with a deep bass line groan, high pitched, siren-like wails, clacking percussion, and steadily thumping drum punctuation.  Where Gordon used to be too cool to emotionally explode via her dispassionate vocal delivery, she now bursts out with surprising fervor, extending her blunt vocal exclamations on the chorus sections and sounding like a siren herself.  She is Kim Gordon; hear her roar!

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