Sonic Youth
The Eternal
The Eternal wasn't supposed to sound like this, the made-up argument goes. Their first non-Geffen release, adorned with cover art by American Primitivist John Fahey, released by Matador--it should be weird, right? After all, Sonic was on Geffen, they had to put their avant garde noodlings out under the SYR moniker due to the complete lack of marketable content. (As well as the occasional quandry that arrives when one records some unlistenable bullshit.) It was all the suits, guy! Now that the man isn't telling Thurston what to do, he's gonna take all that crazy shit he did with Chris Corsano and they're going to change the way that the 500 people who listen to avant-garde American improv music think about avant-garde American improv music. Derek Bailey lives forever! Open your mind!
And yet Eternal isn't like that at all. It's a Sonic Youth album through and through, with Thurston and Kim singing the same kind of random poetry they always have, with the same punk fuzz riffs they always play. It's only experimental if you're looking at if from the beach, if you're stepping back and seeing the history it's got behind it, because the Youth has been around so long that they can't pretend not to have done this before. They totally have, but they just haven't done it in a while.
Sonic Youth has only made one completely horrible album, but they've made quite a few generic ones. And while part of the praise for The Eternal has required a reappraisal of the last few albums they put out, all so that the phrase "they got good again" could be ejaculated, it's not really true to say that The Eternal is leaps and bounds beyond Rather Ripped, Sonic Nurse & Murray Street. All of those were shots at a band still trying to mash their sound into songs, their obsessive chase of making 240 second slices of the music they imagined. This, their 2009 installment, was merely their most recent version. Unadorned by the high pop production that has multiplied and engulfed the various strands of music it had formerly ignored, The Eternal finds itself in the position of being, while not the only, the highest profile rebuttal to the home studio's obsession with perfection. All of this has been covered before, and it will be years before the change can be fully understood or contextualized, but it's worth repeating. Home studio recording technology, the free delivery of music across the internet--together, they've annihilated the idea of albums, shook the foundation of the music industry to its core, and given countless artists a way to reach the audience beyond the mail-order and music nerds. But the other thing they've done is pushed beyond reason the moment when the artist relinquishes the control over the variables, with the retweaking and post-production "fix" lasting far beyond both the recording and creative processes. The myspace divas and mp3 sad boys, following in the tracks laid by the pop singers and the autotuned, are no longer content to allow the human to show through, not when another last bit of adjustment can be control-v'd.
Shorter, more correctly: it's those thirty seconds at the end of "Poison Arrow" when the guitars veer towards Rage Against The Machine hammer toss territory. It's Kim's best vocals since Experimental Jet Set on "Malibu Gas Station". It's the exhausted "really?" that comes before the worth-waiting-for conclusion of "Massage The History".
If they keep getting along so well, Sonic Youth will eventually take their spot next to the Rolling Stones, producing mundane retreads of former glories, extensively touring for the accolades of the Ocean Pacific crew. But this year, they still had something to say.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
Wow, I so didn't get that from this record. Maybe I need to relisten, but I found it pretty boring; closer to latter-day Rolling Stones territory than I'm comfortable with....
Posted by: NoahB | 2009.12.14 at 23:27
Ha, really? Not me man, this one just kept getting better.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2009.12.14 at 23:43