Shadow of a Doubt, by Sonic Youth

Some songs will be in repeated playback in the dancefloor of my memory for the rest of my life. Shadow of a Doubt is one of those: it is more than a landmark; it is a milestone, a song that comes back to me when I least expect it, just when I thought that enough time had passed it comes up to the fore once again, the volume cranked up, to tell me new things about the old days and old things about the present. This song loops like a dream: it is, indeed, a surreal soundscape, an in crescendo hallucination. Kim's whispering penetrates your ears and brain like the voice of your unconscious: it grows, becomes something else, elevates itself as it gets deeper. Whispering becomes yelling, and the meditative, repetitive motif explodes in waves of ecstasy, like a wet dream, when one knows one is dreaming but is unable -and sometimes unwilling- to wake up. Not only a song to make love with, but a song that makes love to you as well, a passionate aesthetic artifact that makes the word 'psychedelia" seem very limited. Shadow of a Doubt deals with fate, regret, the tragic essence of love, the nakedness of our needs and desires, the uncanny nature of dreams, the crave for a kiss when nothing is certain and everything seems dark. Its possibilities are endless, like the infinite interpretations of a recurrent dream.