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

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".

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.