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

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.