Released: 09/06/09

Only a special group can have the combined age of 252 yet still carry the name Sonic Youth. SY are certainly that. Through three decades, from no-wave avant-gardists to alt-rock establishment, they’ve stubbornly maintained a wilfully out of step, confrontational aesthetic which sees them, now on record number sixteen, remain absolutely vital.

Though hanging their hat on more conventional hooks these days, no-one coils together chaotic, discordant guitars with gorgeous melodies quite like Sonic Youth, but then they’ve always had the knack of taking a sweet, melodic song, feeding it through a mangle of distortion, unorthodox guitar tunings and clashing vocals, and finishing with something disturbing yet spectacular; what Salvador Dali would have called “The art of spitting on your mother’s portrait”.

They may have lost some of their experimentalism, The Eternal is no bombardment of noise like 1989’s classic Daydream Nation, but it’s still their best record for the best part of two decades. You won’t find yourself frozen in a confusion of euphoric noise, but with heavy and hooky tracks like Sacred Trickster and What We Know, you might just be tempted to move your hips.

Like all the best Sonic Youth records, The Eternal comes at you from 800 different angles; one minute an abrasive locked groove, the next a coarse grained grunge wig out, then a collage of feedback and colliding guitar riffs. Of course, the trick is in making sure everything ends up in the same place; case in point being Anti-Orgasm, which at times threatens to split its own seam, yet never disintegrates - instead becoming the highlight of the album.

Beat poet Gregory Corso (after whom, in a nod to their New York counter culture roots, Leaky Lifeboat was written) once referred to life on Earth as a leaky boat. Well, on this evidence, even after three decades of bringing the noise, the good ship Sonic Youth isn’t about to sink anytime soon.

www.sonicyouth.com

James Davey