Sonic Youth
The Eternal

It had been a while since I paused over an album in this way. Even the title itself has something absolutistic and immaterial. It's as if it immediately wished to confer a sort of dimensionlessness to a world infinitely distant and unreachable, and therefore eternal. An expression that frankly seemed a bit out of the box to me, although somehow credible.

Surely "The Eternal" is one of Sonic Youth's best works since the days of "Dirty". It's the compendium of their history. Certainly, it's unthinkable to find the noise excesses of "Sister" or "Evol", but somehow The Eternal is a concept album like "Daydream Nation" was, and I realize, in saying this, that I'm saying something extremely bold. You find a narrative and musical canvas from "Sacred Trickster", where Kim Gordon sings in a caustic way reminiscent of "Drunken Butterfly", all the way to the twelfth and final piece "Massage The History", which reminds me of Trilogy. The belief that Jim O'Rourke was a secondary player is absolutely evident, and to me, it was evident two years ago in Turin at Spazio 211 when Sonic Youth performed Daydream Nation. Perfect, when history becomes legend, myth. Silence fell. A performance of absolute value, those experiences you would tell your children if you only had them. Since then, a wait of two years, but it couldn't have been repaid better. They were awaited, redeemed from that almost pop, pleasant turn, but excessively cloying, which is magnanimously granted only to those who are great.

"The Eternal" convinces from start to finish. It should not be taken in small doses. It needs to be put in the player and listened to without interruption. A booklet rich in its simplicity with a dedication to Ron Asheton, guitarist of the Stooges, taken by a heart attack in January with a simple: Forever. A sign that is a bit more than a memory, a true sign of gratitude to a putative father, decidedly less gifted than Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo, but who defined a style.

 Guitar intertwinings like "Anti_Orgasm", arriving at the noise of "Calming The Snake", ascending to the pogo of "Thunderclap For Bobby Pin". There's no sense in recalling the track list in these lines and trying to draw similarities: it's simply Sonic Youth with an utterly enjoyable vein of psychedelia that finds its climax in "Walkin Blue".

I mentioned in the first lines that it's a compendium, a sort of CliffsNotes of American noise. If you want to introduce a friend of yours to the splendid world of Sonic Youth, start here, don't direct them toward the early works, the extreme ones. I'm sure they'll fall in love and never leave the sonic borders. And I invite you to go on YouTube to see some clips from their last tour where they use, for the first time, (and it was about time!) visual art to accompany themselves: simple fabric sheets to project images, symbols. If you’re looking for a recognizable and immediately emerging piece, you won't find it, no track that can claim to be distributed as a 45RPM (and then why?).

With The Eternal, Sonic Youth didn't wish to rehabilitate their trademark but rather to blend together, like a Grenouille perfume or a great wine, the aromas that comprise it, to highlight them both in their entirety and in their distinctive traits, leaving, finally, an extraordinary persistence: eternal.