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From normanrecords.com
I am champion of the staff Sonic Youth prize draw! Master of all things chance based! It is I who hath received a free copy of the yoof’s ‘The Eternal’ on a sexy slab of heavy weight vinyl!!! It is I who hath received the bonus Sonic Youth Live L.P and Dennis Tyfus illustrated poster you get if you were savvy enough to pre-order the L.P!!! It is I who hath been privy to a sneaky peak at the album pre-release thanks to Matador’s Buy Early Get Now scheme that lets you stream the album online. Jealousy levels?? Gloating aside it’s always a pleasure to get my mitts on new Sonic Youth stuff. I’m chuffed to bits that Mark Ibold (Pavement) is playing bass nowadays and the shift to Matador appears to have reinvigorated and inspired the group to kick out some party jams, taking the tunefulness of ‘Rather Ripped’ and rockin’ that shit out 1991 style. Nothing on ‘The Eternal’ breaks new ground, rather it revisits and reinterprets past themes with rigorous enthusiasm and joy. You get elements of the fucked up pop grunge stuff of Dirty/Goo/Sister/Evol (Sacred Trickster, Anti-Orgasm and the awesome Thunderclap For Bobby Pyn), you get space rock outings (Calming the snake), sweet indie pop anthems (Poison arrow) and an epic final track that tips the hat to Washing machine’s stand-out tune ‘The Diamond sea’. The production is too smooth to really invoke the true spirit of the aforementioned tunes (the fact that some douche bag stole all their best equipment a few years back probably doesn't help either) but you get a hint of past glories and that’s enough. I can hear a little of Pavement in ‘No Way’ and the psyche-pop jam of ‘Walking Blue’ and the wonky riff on ‘Malibu Gas Station’ is one of my fave yoof riffs in recent memory. I am a big fan of the later Sonic Youth records so I’m not gonna say something crazy like ‘it’s their best record in 15 year’ but I will commit to ‘their most consistently rocking record in sometime time’ and say that I am loving it right about now yo!! Peace!
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