Sonic Youth

With its grasp over the craft of destroying a song without losing the listener, the dense and ballsy Eternal is proof enough of Sonic Youth’s continuing relevance. Balancing experimentation with rocking out and mellowing down by turn, the New York quintet proves here that it’s still convincingly angry and vital, traits other bread-and-butter acts like Pearl Jam have lost their grip on in their later years. The album starts out in ”˜Sacred Twister’ with twanging atonality before giving way to the meatiest three-riff cycle, bassist Kim Gordon’s blaring horn of a voice raging over the thundering band. And even before we’ve missed a beat, we’re tumbling through ”˜Anti-Orgasm’ (“Liberation, not your sex life/Domination, will you behave/See how we believe in nothing/Anti-god is anti-orgasm”), a six-minute opus that packs the boom of Neil Young’s Mirrorball with apocalyptic noisemaking and a typically meditative calm-after-the-storm second half. Thurston Moore finally comes around to the microphone with his reassuring NY talk-singing on the jagged ”˜Leaky Lifeboat,’ bringing a bit of downtempo in next with the measured groove of ”˜Antenna’ (“Radios play nothing when she’s far away”). It’s only when we get to the thick of the disc, starting with ”˜What We Know,’ that the sameness and arty overkill of wonky protopunk starts to grate. But the music does take a turn for the better with the restrained punkout of the oddly funky, melancholic and dark ”˜Malibu Gas Station’ and closes strong on ”˜Massage the History’, a spacey jam replete with breathy straining vocals reminiscent of the band’s own ”˜I Love Golden Blue’ from 2004’s Sonic Nurse. The noise, of course, is not for everyone. But there are moments on The Eternal where the band transcends expectation.