Even if these iconic mentors are approaching senior status, The Eternal is living proof that youthfulness is just a state of mind, and by continuing to capitalise on one of most welcome U-turns in recent music history, Sonic Youth are now a band we can love, and not merely admire.
The songs on The Eternal are more conventionally rock-oriented than any in Sonic Youth’s career, yet the album doesn’t really sound like a departure.
The irony is that The Eternal might be their most concise record ever. It's also a rock & roll ass-kicker.
The Eternal finds them snarlingly unrepentant after all these years, wearing their fractured art proudly on their sleeves, and mistreating any musical instrument they can lay their hands on.
The band has honed their sound for the past 26 years, and while many milestone marks have been made, The Eternal ushers in the start of many more to come. If Sonic Youth wants to keep massaging their history, there’s not much more we need to ask for.
Somewhere, today, a 15-year-old's musical world is being turned upside down by The Eternal; for the rest of us, it sounds a lot like a Sonic Youth album. This is no bad thing.
Sonic Youth's freedom to follow their bliss is what holds The Eternal together; just as paradoxically, the changes they make on this album not only bring excitement to their music, they reaffirm just how consistently good the band has been -- and continues to be -- over the years.
Both cerebral and corporeal, sacred and profane, ‘The Eternal’ sees this band approach the level of The Velvet Underground, where chaos and beauty ravish each other within the same song. Clever old sods.
Yes, The Eternal is “Another Sonic Youth Record” but it’s also “Another Good Sonic Youth record”, revealing its finer details gradually, even if there’s no fundamentally new approach, arrangement, or message, in any of the songs.
Its indulgent length — just shy of the ten-minute mark — reflects The Eternal’s most glaring weakness: a lengthy running time that undermines its focus on careening, punkish abandon over measured songwriting.
The Eternal is simply just another confirmation that Sonic Youth is one of the most essential---if not the most essential---indie collectives of the past thirty years.
At the very least, some excellent songs lurk among these 12 tracks, and there's enough potential for debate about which are which to make The Eternal worthy of Sonic Youth's singular canon.
The Eternal offers a sort of survey course in SY history, careering from their early art-school atonality to the more melodically sophisticated compositions of later years. The problem is, none of it looks forward; in spelunking through the past, the band seems to have forgotten to unearth anything new.
Really, everything is utterly in its right place on The Eternal, which is also its most glaring flaw, and its this lack of the new that makes it kind of a bummer, though, at the least, a pleasant one.
The Eternal is accessible, listenable, and all the rest: another consistent album from the consistent rock band Sonic Youth.
This was never gonna be another Daydream Nation but it could have been a Murray Street. Even a Sonic Nurse would have been OK. Yeah, kill yr idols, plug the dam of diminishing returns. Sonic Death.
It’s a reminder that this band can still be great. But seeing as it follows tracks like ‘Anti-Orgasm’, with its Pavement-lite riffs, vapid lyrics and tired skronk-outs, and ‘Poison Arrow’ with its impotent chorus and half-arsed growled vocals, few will persevere with The Eternal long enough to hear it.
The final Sonic Youth album. What a ride it's been listening to the band's discography, and they ended off on a good note as well. While The Eternal might not be Sonic Youth at their best, it's definitely a good album. This feels like a combination of their last three albums put into one album, but the music does suffer from it's repetitive and played out nature. Even if it isn't my favorite or one of SY's best albums, you have to admire the band still sounding great even up to the very end.
It's really a shame that this was their last album. I'm sure they weren't planning on it, but of course, we all know what happened.
The Eternal is a very strange album. After Rather Ripped they stuck with the same sort of sound and applied it here, but just had fun with it and made what they wanted to. There are some great standouts like What We Know, Sacred Trickster, Antenna etc. but other songs are just ok. Anti-Orgasm just gets very annoying very fast, especially for it's 6 minute ... read more
Feels like an amalgamation of their playing and songwriting styles across the preceding 20 years - a commendable, fitting career end even if it wasn't planned that way.
It doesn't have any all-time classic Sonic Youth songs but it trades that for being relatively consistent throughout. Might even make a good starting point for the band as it's fairly accessible melodically but still has plenty of breaks for noise. Definitely not an instance of a veteran band not knowing how to make decent music ... read more
1 | Sacred Trickster 2:11 | 92 |
2 | Anti-Orgasm 6:07 | 85 |
3 | Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso) 3:32 | 82 |
4 | Antenna 6:13 | 89 |
5 | What We Know 3:54 | 84 |
6 | Calming the Snake 3:35 | 77 |
7 | Poison Arrow 3:42 | 79 |
8 | Malibu Gas Station 5:39 | 90 |
9 | Thunderclap For Bobby Pyn 2:38 | 72 |
10 | No Way 3:52 | 86 |
11 | Walkin Blue 5:21 | 82 |
12 | Massage the History 9:43 | 91 |
#10 | / | Rolling Stone |
#13 | / | No Ripcord |
#19 | / | Uncut |
#35 | / | NME |
#36 | / | Q Magazine |
#38 | / | MOJO |
#38 | / | NPR |
#50 | / | musicOMH |