Sonic Youth, 'The Eternal' (Matador)
Punk's crafty parental unit puts heads to bed.
By Stacey Anderson 05.20.09 10:24 AM
How nice it’d be to come home to her / And sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen / Aproned young and lovely wanting my baby / And so happy about me she burns the roast beef,” angrily riffed an unhitched Gregory Corso in his 1959 poem “Marriage.” So perhaps it’s with empathy that on Sonic Youth’s 16th album, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore leave a simmering, wistful offering on his Beat altar with “Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso).” After all, they don’t know from his torment, these art-rock Joneses of the solid union, towheaded daughter, and creatively controlled, near-three-decade career.
But who says stability ain’t rebellion? The Eternal is the Youth’s best album since 2002’s Murray Street -- the riots aren’t teenage anymore, of course, but they’re wisely messy and darker, newly rooted in a heavy hookiness akin to Mudhoney and the wipers. “Malibu Gas Station” seeps murky reverb and bizarre guitar detunings, a welcome return to late-’80s/Sister form (and more light for guitarist Lee Ranaldo). “Massage the History” is a ten-minute antithesis to the carefully funneled pop structures of 2006’s Rather Ripped, with Gordon’s rasp and Moore’s guitar creeping like an extra-spooky bedtime story to their daughter. Even she’s a teenager now, too old to believe in fairy tales, but we’re not—Sonic Youth are still the punk fable with a happy ending.
. Sonic Youth have, since 1981 often been at the forefront of rocks many sea changes of styles and sounds, beginning as a difficult to penetrate "no wave" avant garde band to a more stylistically polished and focus noise rock band, balancing their more cathartic moments with a sense of structure and discipline. Towards the end of the century they began cranking out really creative and challenging ep's (the amazing SYR series) and with NYC Ghosts & Flowers (an unfairly underrated album) recreated themselves and droning, laid back noise sculptures, reciting often broken fragments of poetry over stretched out sonic jams.Starting with Murray Street the band began to lapse into a comfortable, textural landscape. Droning, slow to spread out james, often peppered with bits of sonic shards here and there while driven with their pop and songcraft sensibility, spoken and sung verses often resembling free form poetry and free association imagery. Sonic Nurse and Rather ripped were hashed out with the same techniques and were some of the bands least interesting releases and while The Eternal may not exactly be an exciting return to form, it yields plenty of kinetic and driving moments (many of them with Gordon on vocals) and exhibiting a bit more of the feedback noise collages criminally absent from their previously releases and if the song writing may seem more conventional and less driving at times, consider this: the teen age riot is no more, the kids have grown up and if this is "adult rock" so be it, if anything the band have at least found a comfort zone and are exploiting it's boundaries, let's hope they continue pushing
How is this not on the best of year list?
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