into the electric mist

This might surprise a little, though it really shouldn’t, but I think The Eternal is quite possibly the most succinctly expressive album in the three-decade career of Sonic Youth in many respect. (Well, stranger things have come to be.)

Okay, it’s not quite nearing the defining glory of Daydream Nation (1988) or even the nuanced quality of Murray Street (2002) but it’s still a really good record and simply put, rock musicians of their vintage that actually manage to stay as vital or as inexhaustibly creative as them are quite a dwindling niche these days anyway. Package the ultra-melodic pop traction of Rather Ripped (their 2006 album that preceded this new one, also their last on Geffen/DGC) into tidier, more lethal capsules, and you’ll come some way to breathing in the rarefied air of The Eternal.

With The Eternal, their first on Matador Records, Sonic Youth have now got 16 full-length albums under their belt and enough experience to comfortably revel in the sweet hereafter of fractured sounds and distortion like it’s second nature. Quite contrary to their elder statesmen image, throbbing tracks like “Sacred Trickster” and “Poison Arrow” still have all the quickfire immediacy of the undisciplined garage punks (Stooges, MC5, The Germs) that Sonic Youth identifies with.

“Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)” highlights the art-schooled iconoclastic side of these NYC lifers, shards of addictive noise riding on Thurston Moore’s streams of consciousness. On the snarly “No Way”, apparently the first song written for the album, the interlocking guitars pack the seismic force of a murder of crows loitering at the frontiers of an electric mist. The effect of this inspired simplicity is invigorating, enough to hit the road with raw remembrances of teenage riots. “It’s been quite a ride, with you my sweet here by my side,” Lee Ranaldo sings sarcastically in the demeanor of the latest toughs on “What We Know” while a clanging guitar rings in the background like a viciously detuned clarion call.

Likewise on The Eternal, Sonic Youth has taken the time to register new dimensions to this other meditative side of their songcraft that comes into the reckoning more as they mature as musicians. Thurston’s free-associative slow jam “Antenna” is given a gorgeous rendition that fits in thematically with the loose and yet focused vibes of the album in general, and Lee’s complementary “Walkin Blue” takes The Eternal into a milieu of confusion mixed with a sense of numbed contentment.

Be it in snapshot miniatures or in thick sonic spleens, The Eternal wells with such beautifully familiar elements. Taking cues from the album title, these are songs that operate from outside the enclaves of time and their intent is perhaps best surmised in the ten-minute closer “Massage The History”, a Kim Gordon dream vehicle where realms of illusion and the seeming melt into one another in grand chaotic fashion.

sonic-youth forever