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

I'd say it's similar to NYC Ghosts in terms of self-indulgence, though first song aside I couldn't take that album

That clip of "What We Know" up above sounded great!

if there's a winner here, it's gotta be LEE - i can't remember the last time he had so many incredible songs on an SY album

i havent heard this album, but lee rules pretty consistently

WTF. I kind of loved this on first listen.

stream of the whole album.

just listening to anti-orgasm, the song inspired by uschi obermaier. this is pretty good, rather varied stuff. they are not charting any new territory here, they are inspecting landscapes closer which they have already visited.

leaky lifeboat (for gregory corso) is rather soft (lalalala-lala) and pretty pop for a sonic youth track. only 3 and a half minutes.

antenna is a really slow and quite beautiful ballad which could work as a lullabye. the noisy bits are very tame.

what we know, where lee sings, is a little on the heavy, gloomy, dark side. a welcome change from the light ditties before. dominated by guitars and bass.

calming the snake, more of the same classic sy noisy guitar structure cru with kim in yoko ono yelping mode.

poison arrow rumbles along. thurston's voice a little raspy, kim joins in.

malibu gas station starts like a hopper painting, just hanging on the wall. then it accelerates, kim sings. they find their groove. excellent piece.

thunderclap for bobby pyn.
thurston starts this with his sprechgesang. it gets a little dissonant in the second half. seems longer than it is (2'39").

no way.
even on auto pilot sy are more exciting than 99% of the other bands around playing their best songs.

walkin blue.
lee on vocals. he sounds a little like john and paul. sy in grateful dead guitar meandering mode.

massage the history.
an acoustic guitar. that must be a premiere. this doesn't sound like sy at all in the beginning. they prove that they can still reinvent themselves, that they are still no old farts. even kim sings in a sexy, soft way, she whispers and moans the words at the same time. the longest track, ten minutes. excellent.

heard it in tower recs in shibuya which seemed rather apt somehow (for personal reasons: found no new york there YEARS ago). was bopping along and even told my dad i was a fan of the band playing the music in the background. he of course didn"t even acknowledge what i said. hah

it's their most boring album since nyc ghost and flowers (which was even worse)

nyc ghost and flowers will always be redeemed because it has the best song they did since their glory years for the opening track.

Yeah, actually, I think "Free City Rhymes" is one of their best songs period. Everything they're good at - intricate guitar polyphony, epic builds to dissonant climaxes, pop vs noise, etc - actually comes together there.

I kind of tired of The Eternal after streaming about four times, ha.

it is the kind of record that gets pretty tired pretty fast. but the new songs still sounded really good live and I'm sure I will come back to this record in a while (like when it's out) and appreciate it more.

On first listen, it's definitely not as immediate and hooky as Rather Ripped; the songwriting is pretty standard Sonic Youth. But they've made some sonic adjustments that make some of the songs more interesting, such as increased emphasis on multiple vocals, which is really nice. "Walkin Blues" is definitely the highlight of the album for me, the only song that sounds like SY doing something a little different. Also like "Sacred Trickster" (except for the lame lyrics) and "Anti-Orgasm" a lot.

On first listen, it's definitely not as immediate and hooky as Rather Ripped; the songwriting is pretty standard Sonic Youth.

this is what i was thinking, too. i loved how hooky RR was, and was a little let down by this

So the new soundscan has the album debuting at #18. Their first Top 20 album! Though I'm sure they've sold just under 20,000 copies in a week before.

*feelin* the mediocrity of this album, hard. not that it's bad, it seems like they're solidifying their trajectory into goofy, riff-based tuneage. feels more alive than rather ripped. it almost feels like a weak malkmus album to me, but with very signature sy sounds. affecting songs: no way, calming the snake, sacred trixter, antenna

saw them live last night, super heavy on the new album and all those songs kind of killed live. although it was kind of a relief when they did white cross and tom violence.

er, not white cross. also, I left before the final encore where they did sprawl, so, my fault

AKM, are you an Oaklander? I agree that they made the new songs sound great.

yeah this album really kicks ass live, even the songs i had reservations about on record

yeah I was at the oakland show. kind of wish we'd seen the daydream nation songs in the encore but I saw that DN show last year so not a huge loss, and we had to get home. but the show made me appreciate these songs more; I still think they sound kind of weak on the album though.

I saw the 2nd show in D.C. on this tour and I wish there was more DN stuff (only 1 out of the 5 old songs, "Hey Joni"), since they never came anywhere near here with the tour where they played the whole album.

i'm even more psyched for tonight's show after reading your guys' posts about the fox show. but i think the new album is a great SY disc, though it did take about 6 good listens for it to begin to really grow on me

Here's the setlist from last night's show. Pretty typical of this tour as far as catalogue tracks.

Tom Violence
No Way
Sacred Trickster
Calming the Snake
Hey Joni
Anti-Orgasm
Walkin Blue
Poison Arrow
Malibu Gas Station
Antenna
Leaky Lifeboat
Massage the History
Stereo Sanctity

Encore:
What We Know
Shadow of a Doubt

Encore 2:
The Sprawl
'Cross the Breeze

woah have never seen "Stereo Sanctity" live, totally jealous

yeah that was excellent despite the fact I called it white cross a few hours ago. I suppose SY's catalogue is so deep, at this point, that it is impossible and unlikely that they are going to play even 1/4 of what I want to hear.

...until they do a "Live By Request" tour... to which I would not be opposed.

BTW highlights for me were "What We Know" and the seemingly endless (but hypnotic) Massage the History, which has been a household fave on the new one.

was massage the history the one with the thurston sitting down playing an acoustic? cuz that was awesome (I am awful with the names of SY songs)

Massage the memory.

Yeah, that was the one. I was in a trance. (xpost)

yeah "Massage The History" is good live -- at my show people actually starting CLAPPING to the rhythm at the very end when it was just Kim plucking out that slow guitar line, which was weird but kind of awesome

Anybody see the SF show last night?

i was there with a friend that was at the fox the night before. first thing he said about the previous night was that something was just not right with the sound at the fox. after the show last night he said the sound was 20X better. and the band is just a well-oiled machine. the best show i've seen this decade, if not ever. and i'm not just saying that. i love the "lows" that the addition of Mark I. brings; it really fills out their sound well, imo. the crowd was great, too, but there was extra excitement when they broke out Death Valley 69 and another early one for their second encore. there is a link common to the greatest NY bands(VU, Dolls, even the Ramones to an extent)- that capturing the essence of careening subway train - and i LOVE that.

i was there. how can they keep up with the double encores at this stage in their career? jesus

but yes the show was great- it was awesome to see them in a smaller club context instead of a festival like last time, such a traet

i don't understand what you mean by the double encore thing. they pretty much spend the bare minimum amount of time a band of their stature/catalog can spend onstage for a headlining show, and just happen to divide the encore into two encores; pretty much any other band with over a dozen albums and a rabid fanbase does longer shows and gets more out of encores.

it's not like it's all physically taxing to play guitars anyway

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".