Album review: Sonic Youth – The Eternal

Sonic Youth should need no introduction, really, though they’re still refreshingly obscure despite their long tenure with a major label. The Eternal marks their departure from said label, decamping for the respectable climes of Matador Records with the redoubtable Mark Ibold of Pavement as full-time bass player, but you couldn’t say it’s a return to form; to return to form, one must have at some point left form behind.

And despite mutating their own sound with a reliably wilful attitude throughout their career, Sonic Youth have never really dropped the ball at any point. Sure, every fan has their favourite album (usually, if my back-of-the-envelope research is valid, the first one they encounter), but there are no bad apples to poison the barrel – and considering their career stretches close to three decades in length, that’s an achievement unmatched. How many bands that started in 1980 are still working now, let alone still making music on their own terms with no loss of quality or integrity? I can’t think of many.

Granted, The Eternal is a far cry from the spikey assaults of their earliest output, and more considered and stately than their grunge-era albums, but it’s impossible for Sonic Youth to sound like anyone other than Sonic Youth. That’s partly to do with their disregard for conventional notions of harmony and melody – no pedestrian blues-scale plodding here – and partly those distinctive voices, still sounding like the too-cool stoned kids who skipped school while you sat in classes you hated, wishing you had the balls to do the same. But it’s mostly to do with refusing to play by the rules, refusing to be fashionable or marketable or trendy. Sonic Youth make records for their own satisfaction; the fact that we enjoy them is an added bonus.

It’s a game of texture, basically; the shape of the sounds is more important than the notes they’re playing. The Eternal is packed with erratic nuggets of discord among its warmly muffled tones, simple garage rhythms brought to surreal life with curiously apposite choices of chord and volume. Custom modified guitars are played in ways for which they were never designed, sometimes chiming like bells or screeching like enraged drunks or roaring like sentient machines chained deep underground, but mostly just sounding like guitars – which in some respects might be considered Sonic Youth‘s most revolutionary idea. It’s a very minimal and restrained pallet of sound, and it lets the playing come to the foreground. A pop aficionado might accuse them of not knowing how to play at all, and in doing so reveal the true extent of their own ignorance; Sonic Youth have forgotten more ways of playing guitar than most of us could ever hope to learn in a lifetime.

And it’s all here, everything you could ever want, like fifty minutes hanging out in the company of the people you admired from a distance in your adolescence and finding out they’re more like you than you ever expected… and more fey than was initially apparent. From Kim Gordon’s slightly loopy and wild-eyed ranting on album opener “Sacred Trickster” (“what’s it like to be a girl in a band? / I don’t… quite understand”) and “Calming the Snake”, and the sprawling scratches and twangy hooks at the beginning of “Anti-Orgasm” that slink out in a blissful haze of chiming notes and swirly noises; through the dreamily wasted nihilism-pop of “Antenna” or the wild-kids-on-the-run clatter of “Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn” (a tune which does everything the Pumpkins’ “1979” tried to do but never quite achieved), into the beautiful pop bliss of “Walkin Blue” and out on the whispered laments and looping clamour of “Massage the History”, The Eternal is a trip, a journey, a story, a movie, an album, an experience, a lifetime. If you’re a Sonic Youth fan, you’ve probably got it already. If you’re not, start here. Now.