Click here to talk about the next Sonic Youth album - The Eternal

that to sund4r. my least favorite is NYC ghosts & flowers, but it's nowhere near as bad as i thought at the time. sonic nurse and rather ripped are great.

Hm, maybe it was part of aging? I'll admit that I think a lot of those things are among their least successful projects.

xpost "Free City Rhymes" is one of their best songs imo.

i wouldn't say any of this is wrong, i was just thinking of what kinds of problems the band had to deal with when they were making music. like, the latter-day basslines move around a lot more, and often seem more idiomatically 'rock' or 'alt-rock' or whatever in minor but consequential ways. or on some of the songs on 'the eternal', it just seems way more resonant, filling up the soundspace, which means that either the guitars have to play through it (to different effect than in the past) or to be played a different way than before (which i think happens a lot on, say, 'malibu gas station' - those chordings!).

but this all seems pretty hard to make out to me. i think the band more or less kept up its practice of tinkering and modifying and trying new ways to do 'the same thing', but the results don't always stand out in terms of what was done, what problems were solved, what choices were made.

.. i thought the revive of this thread means they are making a new album...

I wish I liked this album more.

"Malibu Gas Station" and "No Way" and "What We Know" are fantastic, among my favorite later SY songs

So the discussion on this thread got me to listen to Rather Ripped and The Eternal. I've actually really been enjoying them! Once you're willing to accept their late-period style, it's clear that they really had mastered it.

the fahey painting is ok but the cover design is pretty shitty imo

it looks like goatse

lol do you guys realize that it's supposedly from a series of painting fahey made with his butt?

― some dude, Friday, 13 February 2009 16:14 (nine years ago) Permalink

for whatever reason this factoid has lodged itself in my brain but i see like no evidence of it online. is it true?

SY made this album with their butt!!

+67 upvotes; -11 downvotes; 2 fp's

i read that elsewhere as well but haven't been able to track down info anywhere xp

interesting article from Simon Reynolds on the artist as consumer re: The Eternal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/apr/07/sonic-youth-underground-influences

― Dan S, Saturday, April 11, 2009 10:26 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i still dn really know what they're doing here but at least this SR review has this virtue (for all his frequent sniffy undercutting of records just not to his taste that he's found theses to indict them with), that he identifies something for them to be doing:

So The Eternal is literally a self-portrait of the artists as consumers.