Memory Lane

After hearing that there’s a new album out you decide to go and buy it from your local record shop. You could go to HMV, but you go to Fopp instead. You could download it even but this opportunity is too good to pass up. You ask the guy working behind the counter if they have the new Sonic Youth album in. You could just look on the shelves couldn’t you? But that wouldn’t be right, you have to let the guy in the shop know – a complete stranger – you’re not an idiot, you’re not like the rest of the customers. You are a Sonic Youth fan. Leaving with a palpable sense of self-satisfaction, The Eternal in your hand, you go back and listen to it start to finish…

From their formation in the infancy of the eighties to the latter years of our current decade, New York’s Sonic Youth have solidified their reputation as one of the most influential bands of the last quarter of the twentieth-century, sold more t-shirts than many Premier League teams, outlasted nearly all of the scenes to which they have been connected and of course released a wealth of much vaunted records.

However, there’s a tension between being connected to the adolescent angst of Gilmore Girls and Juno whilst at the same time being responsible for some of the most definitive albums of the last twenty years. When a self-proclaimed music fan waxes lyrical about their love of Sonic Youth it’s like an apparent wine lover claiming to just adore a good chardonnay – both stink of the common sense of a Guardian-reading, Green Party-voting culture whose vanguards only eat organic, drive hybrids and think that Brighton was built from the bones of Gandhi.

But this is no cause to disregard the band. In fact people that would cringe at anyone who says SY are their favourite band – deeming it too obvious or mainstream a choice – only prove their inability to get over their snobbish association of the band to their following. This attitude is the shit that sticks and soils many considerations of the groups’ actual achievements.

For a band that has preserved such a recognisable sound it would seem paradoxical to claim that their strength lies in adaptation. If Daydream Nation (1988) is their formative record then the following four- Goo (1990), Dirty (1992), Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star (1994) and Washing Machine (1995)- demonstrate how a great swathe of influences flow in and out of their work. No other band is so typified by major-minor key changes, from Pixies-like melodies to creeping progressions in the mould of Slint. The vicious shreddings of Big Black can be heard not only in their Albini-like production values from ’88 to ’95 but also more prominently in the noise that they can bring out of instruments so consistently on record and live. With this as their core Thurston Moore et al have added subtleties from various areas and genres. Grunge is always detectable but makes more obvious strides into Dirty. No Star in particular shows how this hardcore punk influence was channelled into a form that noise bands from Lightning Bolt and beyond are ever indebted to. By the time of Washing Machine- in the concluding track ‘The Diamond Sea’- SY seem to be talking the language of post rock with the genre’s heavy emphasis on fluctuating dynamics and the combination of outright noise and melody. In doing so anticipating what would follow two years later with Mogwai’s Young Team.

In this period particularly each album demonstrates a different slant on its predecessor and SY manage to find that eagerly sought middle-ground between absorbing what is going on around them while also keeping a central method that works and a sound that is recognisably theirs. The success of Sonic Nurse in 2004 as the band would be getting the key to the door is proof of their remarkable longevity. While not really being a groundbreaking record and in many respects not too dissimilar from what has gone before, the album marks the new direction they would follow on Rather Ripped (2006). On one hand with Nurse you have the recognisable unconsummated melodies that at first tease our expectations only to undercut them and break into discordant explorations of distortion. Hearing these unexpected changes has to a certain degree become expected in itself and explains the band’s decision to develop further co-collaborator Jim O’Rourke’s influence on the following record.

The Eternal- their sixteenth studio recording (if you include Ciccone Youth)- is also the first on Matador records, the label that boasts talent as diverse as Belle and Sebastian, Fucked Up and Mogwai yet is still a far cry from SY’s punk roots. The album has shed itself of the Death Cab leanings of tracks like ‘Do You Believe in Rapture?’ and seems to have taken a retrospective glance to the guitar method of the late Ron Asheton, of The Stooges fame and to whom The Eternal is dedicated. ‘What We Know’ is the most potent example of this, a track that bursts out from behind the tamer, pop-friendly ‘Antenna’ with a dirty riff and distorted thrashing that the most recent Iggy & the Stooges album couldn’t achieve. Indeed, it’s quite strange that this album evokes such connections with canonical rock and punk. The chorus on ‘Walkin Blue’ nostalgically brings up In Utero-era Nirvana and even Lou Reed-style vocals are present on ‘Poison Arrow’. This is especially surprising after the album’s opening offered up the jagged rhythms and crunching chords of the Drive Like Jehu end of hardcore punk.

As Sonic Youth approach their pearl anniversary they’ve made an album that is remarkable for how un-dated it sounds. Partly this is owing to excellent production courtesy of their own efforts as well as those of John Agnello whose back catalogue includes Alice Cooper, Patti Smith and Dinosaur Jr. among others. But mainly it seems to be because The Eternal owes so much more than past SY fare to music that is impervious to the flux of contemporary music fashion. Yet at the same time this album manages to avoid the trap of a band simply reworking the hits of their favourite teenage bands. It’s doubtful whether The Eternal will be deemed one of SY’s best efforts, but considering the company which each new record has to keep that is by no means an insult.