Rating: * * * *
Verdict
:
Still sounding good 16th time around
You can hardly blame Sonic Youth for not taking any drastic diversions on their 16th album. They have their many weird and wonderful side projects to enable them to go off on muscial tangents.
The thing is, you can't help but listen in amazement to
The Eternal
as the band set about doing exactly what they've always done since forming in New York in 1981. Guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo flit between scampering up and down the necks of their guitars, plucking menacing harmonics, and attacking a riff; bass player Kim Gordon gauges away and adds her dour yelp to offset Moore's droll monotone; and drummer Steve Shelley is a beavering man-machine.
If anything,
The Eternal
maintains an unsettling and discordant mood compared to the more melodic and tuneful previous two albums,
Rather Ripped
and
Sonic Nurse.
But really it's business as usual with mid-song freak-outs, like on the scorching
What We Know; Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso)
has a
Kool Thing
groove to it and Gordon is at her glowering best on the tense
Calming the Snake
; and the album ends with the spooky meandering soundscape, broken up by a trademark intensifying squall, on nine-minute-long
Massage the History.
The Eternal
is not quite
Daydream Nation
or
Evol
, but it's still as harrowing, alluring, and trippy as ever.
- Scott Kara
The host has been spotted across the Atlantic post-election.