Sonic Youth - The Eternal

Sonic Youth - The Eternal (****)
album review for the skinny

Sonic Youth's greatest album is always whichever one you heard first - unless that was NYC Ghosts & Flowers (you poor thing). The band's famous experimentalism, so initially radical to the sonic tuning of a youthful mind, starts to sound kinda formulaic after your fifth or sixth album of it. But so what if they've been scratching the same off-chords for 20 years, if Thurston Moore is still sloganeering cryptic bullshit in his same slacker-kid drawl now he's hit 50 years old? Somehow - maybe it's a good skin care regime - The Eternal keeps up their new millennium hot streak, which is still slightly behind their '80s hot streak, but catching. 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.