I love the Sonic Youth. I remember seeing them play in the street at the Sunset Junction several years ago as I stood on the bottom of a ferris wheel and they rocked it! Since then they recorded some softer records ("Sonic Nurse" & "Murray Street"), but "the Eternal" marks a return to the more traditional sound for Sonic Youth. Your mom will again ask you: "What's that noise?!" This record is way more aggressive, dirty, and experimental and recalls the New York indie rock sound of the late-80s and early 90s. I've been hearing Sacred Trixter for a few months now and you probably have been as well. It took a while for me to come around on it, but I like it a lot now and find Kim's voice just as fiesty as ever. Gritty guitar sound and snarky lyrics abound on other tracks like Leaky Lifeboat, Antenna, and What We Know. The swirling sounds show Sonic Youth still to be at the top of the heap in an era where most releases are weak by comparison. They do cross the hokey barrier on occasion (Poison Arrow), but it is at a minimum.
If you're looking for a new record to play really loud, then Sonic Youth has given us all that again and hopefully can spur a release of more aggressive music into this world scmindie crap that modern independent music has become.
Grade: 8.1
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Hokey? Do you mean hokey like too calculated and constructed, or hokey like too cornball?
ReplyDeleteI can understand that the band doesn't always turn everyone's crank, but personally I love this track. (Mind you, my fanvid is admittedly hokey, in every sense of the word...)
My impression of Poison Arrow as hokey stems directly from the repetition in the chorus and ending. Fortunately, Sonic Youth is one of the few bands that nearly everyone has an entirely different opinion of (with the exception of Daydream Nation) and it's easy to agree to disagree on 90% of their songs. Hell, anyone could argue that "Sonic Nurse" was possibly the worst album title ever, but it's their most accessible record to date in my opinion.
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