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

anyone have an image link?

it's their best artwork since Goo imo

http://cdn.stereogum.com/img/thumbnails/posts/sonic_youth-the-eternal-album_art.jpg

Noice.

the fahey painting is ok but the cover design is pretty shitty imo. i'm pumped for the album though, rather ripped was their best album in years

i do like the dash in "sonic-youth" though

it looks like goatse

I'm totally pumped about this album -- didn't like Rather Ripped as much as the 2 before it, but my general feeling is that, to paraphrase Keith Moon, Sonic Youth are still the best Sonic Youth-style band in the world, so as long as they want to make records I will listen to them.

It's kind of funny to read Thurston's recent interviews where he talks about how excited he is to get off Geffen and how constricted they felt making the last few albums...like wtf, they lasted on a major label about 10 years longer than almost any comparable band had, and gave up any hope of getting on the radio like 5 albums ago. I find it hard to believe they were trying to appease record execs with Sonic Nurse or NYC Ghosts & Flowers, or that they're really going to do much differently, musically or otherwise, with Matador.

the rather ripped LP art was awesome! (i agree, the CD art was good but not great)

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?

sorry, i am egregiously undereducated on the subject of john fahey asshole art

like wtf, they lasted on a major label about 10 years longer than almost any comparable band had

I was going to say, the only other one I can think of with a run approaching that was Stereolab on Elektra.

Mark Ibold is apparently being credited as a full member of the band now.

hey i'm no fahey sphincter aficionado myself, i just happened to read the interview in the new Blender where Thurston mentioned the origin of the cover art

08 Malibu Gas Station

This was my dad's occupation the last time I saw him when I was 3.

Anyway, carry on.

fahey sphincter aficionado

^ username anyone? ^

looking forward to this -- I just got Rather Ripped last year and really like it. Actually might like 00s SY more than 90s SY. Maybe.

Rather Ripped fans: You all know you're mental, right? kthx

Sonic Youth are still the best Sonic Youth-style band in the world

I totally disagree!

what's wrong with Rather Ripped? Might be a bit low-key, but I like that ...

Sundar, who else would you nominate? I mean I guess it all depends on how broadly you define "Sonic Youth-style band," but still, I feel like for all their influence they're still in a category fo their own.

Mark Ibold is apparently being credited as a full member of the band now.

I thought that looked like Ibold in the promo photo in a magazine I was flipping through the other day.

Rather Ripped surprised me with how good it was, making me realize I'd just been settling and pep-talking myself about SY for years when I really shouldn't have been. More like that one, plz!

I don't think RR fans are mental per se but I don't really get the enthusiasm, do y'all think it's dramatically different from or better than the 2 before it? It feels like such a continuation (but not improvement on) the sound of those albums to me.

Not that I didn't like Rather Ripped, I just feel like that aren't really advancing their sound anymore and that at this point they're treading water....

― someone who seems to only rep for ghastly prefab autotuned pop (The Brainwasher), Friday, February 13, 2009 3:55 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

um i had to say this, like saying "candyman" three times in the mirror..but..isn't this attitude sort of....rockist?

weird, sounds totally different to me ... shorter, peppier songs with parts more approximating "hooks" and choruses. i was pretty bored by murray street, sonic nurse, and i feel like there's another one in there i've completely forgotten about

RR is a continuation yes, but a marked improvement.

I guess it all comes down to songs, though. Unlike Sonic Nurse and Murray Street, there's not a single moment of RR I don't like.

I'd say SY's 00s output is more enjoyable than their 90s output.

Rather Ripped was enjoyable, cruisin in the car summer tunes in way that I can't say about the bulk of their output. That's a good thing.

So yay to The Eternal.

yeah maybe this is just a personal preference thing...to me the best of SY's later records are the ecstatic instrumental sections of 7+ minute jams like "Rain On Tin"...i don't really look to them for shorter, peppier songs with "hooks," although they did excel at those at one point earlier in their career.

the Blender article did mention one song on The Eternal being 8 minutes long, though, so there'll be at least one surefire jam for me.

rather ripped is fukkin great

btw this seems like a good candidate for another IMM tribute album

yay more SY summer jamz

03 Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso)

^this is just so "sonic youth" it makes me puke haha

(loooooooool at the username)

xp lol yes

some dude, i'm with you, i think the 00 epics surpass the 90 epics. listened to RR the other day and i like most of it, but it's not very memorable.

looking forward to this a lot, for mark ibold and the thurston remarks mentioned about the "freedom of being on a indie label again"

whoever called goo/dirty songs "sketches" for what SY are up to now = insane i/t brane. i think they're making very pleasant music these days, and the laid-back jams are exceptional, but the songwriting is much less interesting & memorable. plus i miss the jagged, angsty, headfucking rockaroll shit (but that's just me)

Wonder if they'll sell more now that they're on Matador? Would not be surprised.

Cover reminds me a lot of Imperial Wax Solvent.

..which is good

painting is cool, regardless of whose ass hairs it incorporates, but the "framed by white text in black stripes" thing doesn't work for me. i mean, it looks okay, solid design, but it's also kind of dull/flat/ordinary.

but i can't decide. there's also something very satisfying about it.

There was talk elsewhere of it being in a similar vein as Michael Gira's Young God art (up until recently, anyway). I can get behind that, but I would've gone another way with the typeface.

xpost don't you mean sASStisfying?

johnny fever OTM - basic design is very similar to OG young god house look, but less 80s clenched, foursquare. more i look at it, the better i think it'll look LP size, and the only problem i'm having is the big-on-top, small-at-the-bottom thing

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/swanssndtrks.jpg

young god = better font

i like the font sy used for washing machine, though

young god font = more "correct", but almost too much so. effect is right on, but kinda inert, too. washing machine font was perfect, but mostly cuz it was a picture of a font. i'm starting to think i like use of a more questionable font, makes the final result less stable, more indeterminate

I'm surprised there isn't a band called FONT yet (despite the lack of googleability).

(allmusic lists an empty stub for a "World" band called Font. But no history = no exist. That's all I could find)

washing machine font was perfect, but mostly cuz it was a picture of a font.

i was referring to the font used for the spine, track titles on the back, etc. i like the font because of it's "less determinate" quality.

iirc (don't have a copy of Washing Machine handy), it was just Helvetica Light or some variation thereof.

^ this. it's another perfectly serviceable and totally correct font that doesn't inject any tension into the design

topics discussed on ilm threads, in order of most frequent:

1) sociology
2) poll position placement
3) hipsters
4) strawmen
5) hipster strawmen
6) links to blogs
7) cover art
8) font
9) music

f u drum boy

sitting there on your throne the whole time

hey now half the time i stand up and wear a bass drum

do you ever wear the bass drum on dates, to impress ladies

y/n?

y

not sure if you were completely serious, some dude. but with all the enrgy and decibels SY put out, i'm completely satisfied w/ even just a 60 minute set. maybe becuz my ears are kind of old; more than 90 minutes of SY @ maximum volume is PLENTY (for me). i did enjoy a couple Grateful Dead shows a long time ago, but they are kind of the exception to my less is more rule

well, they played well under 90 minutes when i saw them and i kinda doubt they go much longer than that very often. a lot of bands their age or older tend to play at least 2 hours (admittedly usually in bigger venues, but still), and i don't feel like SY are so energetic that they're exhausting themselves onstage. not complaining at all, though, it was a great show, one of the best I've seen this year

honestly i don't think i want to see anyone play for more than an hour, and most bands could stand to stick to half-hour sets

last minute of malibu gas station is pretty good

Going back for seconds at the Fillmore in January. I'm still into this record enough to hear them play it again.

i kind of feel like a lot of the loops thrown by their post-2000 records involve having the bass playing be done by musicians, i.e. people who learned how to play the bass in other kinds of music than sonic youth music. i don't exactly want to denigrate kim gordon's playing, but it's always seemed to me like the least interesting part of the band. whereas a lot of the recent stuff seems to be most 'normal' (as far as their settling into groovy tuneful jamsmiths goes) where the bass is most prominent.

i've never really tried to get straight on who's playing what on all these records, though.

Disappointing end to the band.

Still an alright album, though.

xp - i dunno, it seems to me that they switched gears on a number of fronts between washing machine and nyc ghosts. they biggest change, it seems to me, was that they at least partially disengaged from the the alternative pop culture that they'd helped create. they'd never again even try to write a song like "kool thing" or "bull in the heather", wouldn't pull another "into the groove(y)". they didn't seem to be shooting for 120 minutes success anymore, were content to simply be sonic youth, existing in an art-rock bubble of their own design. at the same time, they de-emphasized the noise, angst and transgression that had once balanced and sharpened the pop flirtations. they may not have abandoned difficult listening, but they saved the outest stuff for peripheral releases (like the SYR series) and solo projects. plus all their voodoo shit got yoinked.

not saying you're wrong, just that there's factors.

I've always really enjoyed Kim's bass-playing, though I'm sure her move to third guitar might explain their ease with the jammier material that followed.

they biggest change, it seems to me, was that they at least partially disengaged from the the alternative pop culture that they'd helped create. they'd never again even try to write a song like "kool thing" or "bull in the heather", wouldn't pull another "into the groove(y)". they didn't seem to be shooting for 120 minutes success anymore, were content to simply be sonic youth, existing in an art-rock bubble of their own design.

What was left of that 'alternative pop culture' by 2000? How well did Sonic Youth even fit into it in the early 90s? None of those singles was a "Creep" or "Loser", let alone a "Teen Spirit"/"Jeremy". Afaict, releasing singles like "The Empty Page" and "Incinerate" and touring with the Black Keys probably showed about as much effort to engage with 00s modern rock as they showed in the early 90s. "Into the Groove(y)" was as peripheral as the SYR releases, surely.

I mostly agree with j. One interesting KG bass moment is the harmonics on "Secret Girl". She has some cool riffs on Confusion too, esp "Protect Me You".

This is the only meh post -2000 SY album.

I never really got into Rather Ripped or this one as albums but I like "Antenna" quite a bit. Maybe I should try them again.

well, i think the shift is most apparent between dirty & experimental jet-set on one hand and a thousand leaves on the other, and the latter came out in '98. i wasn't saying that they they were ever hitmakers on the nirvana/radiohead level, but rather that they at one time seemed to be fascinated and legitimately engaged with pop as something existing outside of themselves, as part of the urban landscape, something to mock, borrow, bounce off of, transform and criticize. in addition to the above examples, the booth recording of "addicted to love", blasting snippets of madonna & J&MC, rapping, tons of covers, grunge promotion, "eliminator jr.", carpenters fixation, etc. this side of y2k the sensibility lingers in tracks like "mariah carey & the arthur doyle hand cream", but the sense of a real push-pull relationship with mainstream pop is gone, imo.

i seem to remember "groove(y)" being kind of a big deal among critics and indie rockers at the time of its release, especially in the UK mags i was reading, but sonic youth in general were closer to the center of the pop cultural conversation back then. i retrospect it has come to seem rather peripheral, yeah.

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.