Sonic Youth - The Eternal

4/5 stars
Album review by Ally Brown.
Published 02 June 2009

Sonic Youth's greatest album is always whichever one you heard first - unless that was NYC Ghosts & Flowers (you poor thing). The band's famous experimentalism, so initially radical to the sonic tuning of a youthful mind, starts to sound kinda formulaic after your fifth or sixth album of it. But so what if they've been scratching the same off-chords for 20 years, if Thurston Moore is still sloganeering cryptic bullshit in his same slacker-kid drawl now he's hit 50 years old? Somehow - maybe it's a good skin care regime - The Eternal keeps up their new millennium hot streak, which is still slightly behind their '80s hot streak, but catching. Somewhere, today, a 15-year-old's musical world is being turned upside down by The Eternal; for the rest of us, it sounds a lot like a Sonic Youth album. This is no bad thing.

Comments (5)

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  • Good point about your first being your favourite. Goo it is then.

    Posted by Darren Carle | Sunday June 2009 @ 21:30

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  • Dirty.

    Posted by Dave Kerr | Thursday December 2009 @ 12:31

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  • Daydream Nation.

    Posted by RJ Thomson | Thursday December 2009 @ 15:36

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  • I'm with Rupert. Funny though, a mate of mine's favourite is NYC Ghosts & Flowers.

    Posted by Finbarr Bermingham | Thursday December 2009 @ 16:01

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  • There's no way back from the first full riff of Teenage Riot for me. One of my favourite guitar moments ever. On Voodoo Child (Slight Return) Hendrix plays and it sounds like a conversation; but as Teenage Riot kicks in Thurston Moore is somehow recording the sound of an existence-confirming memory.

    Posted by RJ Thomson | Friday December 2009 @ 13:19

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