shop | mailing lists
musicOMH
music: album reviews
Sonic Youth - The Eternal
(Matador) UK release date: 8 June 2009
5 stars
Sonic Youth - The Eternal

buy this title


track listing

1. Sacred Trickster
2. Anti Orgasm
3. Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)
4. Antenna
5. What We Know
6. Calming The Snake
7. Poison Arrow
8. Malibu Gas Station
9. Thunderclap For Bobby Pyn
10. No Way
11. Walkin' Blue
12. Massage The History

related
ALBUM:
Sonic Youth - The Eternal

ALBUM:
Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped

ALBUM:
Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse

GIG:
Sonic Youth @ Forum, London

GIG:
Sonic Youth @ Roundhouse, London

MUSIC DVD:
Sonic Youth - Corporate Ghost

external
Sonic Youth


Legendary New York indie-rockers Sonic Youth are back with their 15th studio album, The Eternal. To Sonic Youth fans, though, this is more like the fourth in a series of albums that has seen the band become totally revitalised with the turning of the century. What started with the majestic Murray Street and was further honed with the retrospective Sonic Nurse and the forward-looking Rather Ripped has been completed with The Eternal.

Even the grandiose title evokes a sense of finality and timelessness. It's as though this album, more than any other since the band's landmark opus Daydream Nation, has been chosen as the ideal candidate to leave to posterity. Its 12 tracks are as much a window into the past as they are a window into the future.

Melody was the instrument that helped shed light on everything Sonic Youth were doing. For an entire decade, the band meddled with dissonance like it were a dependence-inducing tricyclic. Their reliance on a musical form that they had already mastered saw them churn out stale albums, almost indistinguishable from one other. Occasionally, you'd glimpse an alternate path.

But tracks like A Thousand Leaves' Sunday would get lost amid discordant waves of frustrated and frustrating, dead-end experimentalism. It felt like Sonic Youth preferred to exist on the cusp of what they could be, perhaps reluctant to share the limelight with arguably more straight-laced alternatives such as Pavement and Radiohead. And then came Murray Street and the beautiful opening bars of The Empty Page and this band made sense again.

In many ways the antithesis of Murray Street, it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to make sense of The Eternal. The album's lascivious undercurrent would leave Josh Homme in a right fidgety sweat. Opening track, Sacred Trickster - and the majority of the album's songs - would sit quite happily on a Queens Of The Stone Age record. Its breakneck tempo and crunching guitar textures are urgent, sex-ridden and immediately lovable. With her signature detached effortlessness, Kim Gordon wants someone to: "levitate me on the ground."

Perhaps a reference to the Pixies, but more than likely just a craving for satisfaction, her guttural and libidinous uh uh uh uhs of Anti-Orgasm set an impossibly filthy tone. As the album's glorious opening onslaught turns you on and leaves you gagging for more, the towering, lovelorn Antenna reminds you there's a vulnerable, human flipside to the blinkered, animalistic pursuit of pleasure.

Although Homme's brand of bubble-gum desert-rock is noticeable throughout, the influence of other hall-of-famers is obvious. What We Know's constant dum-dum-pah pounding and crazed fretwork is really a scuzzed-up appropriation of Radiohead's There There, while No Way's riff-heavy funk is a brutalised homage to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

When The Eternal's brain is not totally preoccupied with sex, its more expressive forays meander with the progressive-rock mentality of Led Zeppelin. Rather than becoming lost in wastelands of noisy cacophony, The Eternal explores and meanders with a justifiable cause and a satisfying effect.

The album climaxes with Kim Gordon's elongated elegy to her lover, Massage The History, which bears all the confused, crushed-up emotion of PJ Harvey, circa Uh Huh Her. Some will amuse themselves with the ironic inevitability of it all; the band that influenced a generation is now being influenced by that generation. But it's not like history doesn't owe Sonic Youth the odd favour.

Ultimately, The Eternal acts as a fitting and timeless aide-mémoire of everything this mighty band has ever achieved. By soaking the record with a sweaty aphrodisia they have made it amazing fun not just for us but for themselves. There's melody, noise, desire and reflection, but it never over-indulges in any of its vices.

Even if these iconic mentors are approaching senior status, The Eternal is living proof that youthfulness is just a state of mind, and by continuing to capitalise on one of most welcome U-turns in recent music history, Sonic Youth are now a band we can love, and not merely admire.

  share: 
Facebook | Digg | del.icio.us | more
Mercury Prize 2009 nominees
FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE SPEECH DEBELLE KASABIAN FRIENDLY FIRES
LA ROUX BAT FOR LASHES THE HORRORS GLASVEGAS
SWEET BILLY PILGRIM THE INVISIBLE LISA HANNIGAN LED BIB

top albums
most read reviews in the last seven days
Mariah Carey
Mariah Carey


Cheryl Cole
Cheryl Cole


Robbie Williams
Robbie Williams


Julian Casablancas
Julian Casablancas
recommended reading
INTERVIEW
Gary Numan on pleasure principles and flying machines, 30 years after A.R.E. Friends Electric?
ALBUM REVIEW
Martha Wainwright's Edith Piaf set, Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, a Paris.
ALBUM REVIEWS out this week
Julian Casablancas, The Hidden Cameras, Weezer, Luke Haines, Espers, Local Natives, Skunk Anansie, The O's...
more album reviews
out this week:
Julian Casablancas - Phrazes For The Young The Hidden Cameras - Origin: Orphan Weezer - Raditude
Luke Haines - 21st Century Man Espers - III Local Natives - Gorilla Manor
coming soon:
Martha Wainwright - Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, a Paris Robbie Williams - Reality Killed The Video Star Mariah Carey - Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel
Will Young - The Hits Joe Goddard - Harvest Festival The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Higher Than The Stars EP
recent releases:
Cheryl Cole - Three Words McAlmont & Nyman - The Glare Miike Snow - Miike Snow
Devendra Banhart - What Will Be Will Be Kings Of Convenience - Declaration Of Dependence Wolfmother - Cosmic Egg
Portico Quartet - Isla Annie - Don't Stop Whitney Houston - I Look To You
The Antlers - Hospice BEAK> - BEAK> Atlas Sound - Logos
Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport The Flaming Lips - Embryonic Shakira - She Wolf
more album reviews
Twitter


recent interviews and features
Gary Numan
Gary Numan
INTERVIEW
Miike Snow
Miike Snow
INTERVIEW
Basement Jaxx
Basement Jaxx
INTERVIEW
The Big Pink
The Big Pink
INTERVIEW
more interviews

  more album reviews...



musicOMH
about us
contact
copyright
home
elsewhere
Twitter
Facebook
Last.fm
Soundcloud
MySpace
© 1999-2009 OMH