Sonic Youth
The Eternal
Matador Records
By Mike Randall
Has a band ever aged as gracefully as Sonic Youth? Grace may not be the best adjective; consistently creative might be more appropriate. Still, no matter how you skin the cat, the band has not only remained at the forefront of cool for the better part of three decades, they’ve never not stayed true to themselves, which in the new millennium has equated some of the finest output of their career. Sure, they don’t sound the same as they did on Confusion Is Sex, but they definitely still sound like Sonic Youth. Reading between the lines of that statement hints at one thing: they’re always evolving, which speaks volumes 16 albums in.
Every time a new Sonic Youth record comes out the easy thing to do is to compare it to something they’ve done previously or to say this is the best album they’ve done since Washing Machine. With The Eternal, that’s almost impossible, as it’s a culmination of just about everything they’ve created over the course of the last ten years or so. Harder than Rather Ripped, more consistent than Sonic Nurse, and jammier than Murray Street in a structured sense, The Eternal is a modern SY fan’s wet dream. While the band these days saves their more experimental material for their SYR series, The Eternal might be the perfect middle ground between their recent accessibility and the ferocious nature of their earlier work.
There are no two guitarists as tuned into each other as Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, and that interplay sounds as effortless as ever here. Their barrage of post-punk riffage and lateral chord blocks can knock you down with a single punch or lift you up in a trance, often at the same time. The ass-backward tunings they devise put them as close to modern electric guitar architects as any players anywhere, but as crazy as it is to say, Moore and Ranaldo almost take a back seat to Kim Gordon this time out. Singing about painters, writers, dancers and activists, Gordon has an unprecedented swagger that not only comes through in her finest singing and sexy inflection it propels the rest of the band. On the album opening “Sacred Trickster,” Gordon asks, “I want you to levitate me/Don’t you love me yet?” It’s sung more as an order than a question because it’s clear she already knows the answer. When she sings, “Who shot the poison arrow?” above flowery guitars and a tight groove, again it’s with a sinister tone that points an invisible finger right back at her.
Gordon isn’t only about toying with us, though. The band touches upon the crime of moral hypocrisy (“Anti-war is anti-orgasm”) during the Dirty-era grunge of “Anti-Orgasm,” which finds a magnetic vocal thump of “Uh uh uh uh uh” between Gordon and Moore and a beautiful tension-laden jam that frees itself compliments of SY’s aforementioned Jazzmaster wizards. A similar Gordon/Moore vocal hook (“La la la la la la”) exists during the offbeat “Leaky Lifeboat,” a screechy tribute to NYC beat poet Gregory Corso, but it’s during “Calming The Snake” that Gordon has never sounded more lustful. “Come on down to the river/Come on down I want to feel you shiver” she sings above a serpentine bass groove that gives way to descending noise madness while leaving the bottom-end in tact. Its monster ending is one of several bombastic closings delivered on The Eternal, and no band knows how to end with more gusto than Sonic Youth, further evident through “Massage The History,” another example of an epic finale putting an SY record to bed. Full of moody atmospheric guitar tone shifts, screeching noise and acoustic undertones resembling Moore’s Trees Outside the Academy, Gordon makes one last appearance, using her scratchiest, trippiest PJ Harvey/White Chalk voice to sing, “Not everyone will make it out alive.”
If Kim isn’t your bag then this record likely isn’t for you, but it must be said that Moore, Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold aren’t just casual observers. While certainly not classifiable as experimental under the Sonic Youth guise, there are some fine examples of the guys stretching out and trying some out-of-the-ordinary tricks. Moore’s “Thunderclap For Bobby Pyn,” is instantly catchy (he leads energetic hooks of “Whoaoaoa Yeahahyeah” with the band chiming in unison behind him), as is the highly melodic, down-tempo “Antenna,” as triumphant a piece the band has recorded. There’s a West Coast surf vibe to the hilariously titled “Malibu Gas Station,” an apparent ode to the moronic tribulations of Britney Spears; it’s a Gordon-sung tune, but its dreamy intro and what might be the band’s closest thing to a standard guitar solo are clearly property of the guys.
Back on an indie label and with a record that doesn’t re-hash but re-creates, it’s almost as if Sonic Youth has come full circle. After all, with a career that has found one album lending inspiration to the next, it’s fitting that at some point they’d make an album that re-interprets a bunch of them. With the urgency that they deliver The Eternal, however, they’re set to make another full trip around that circle.
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