Average Metacritic score is 79 (36 reviews):

by Sonic Youth
The Eternal (Matador)
Release Date: June 9, 2009
Metacritic Ranking: 100 (4 Stars review)
Pitchfork: 6.8




http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_b ... ernal.html

Album review: Sonic Youth's 'The Eternal'
June 9, 2009 | 3:47 pm

For nearly two decades, Sonic Youth followed its experimental whims under the Geffen corporate banner, making forward-looking rock as exciting and truly distinctive as anything they'd created for the guerrilla indie labels SST and Blast First. Their newest, "The Eternal," is the first to be released through the proud indie vet Matador, and the transition begins with a moment of clanging, atonal guitars.

Boho superstar Kim Gordon rips into two quick, breathless minutes of "Sacred Trickster," scraping at her guitar strings as she recites an imagined conversation: "What's it like to be a girl in a band? / I don't quite understand / That's so quaint to hear / I feel so faint, my dear."

Sonic Youth has perfected and expanded its approach through the years, still grinding at will but also laying back to take in the beauty of a quieter moment. Their cultural touchstones are again the lives of tragic artists, with lyrical references here to painter Yves Klein and Beat poet Gregory Corso, among others. Singer-guitarist Thurston Moore's "Thunderclap (For Bobby Pyn)" is an excited ode to first-wave L.A. punk and doomed local antihero Darby Crash.

Drummer Steve Shelley sends anxious, tumbling beats through "Driving the Snake," and singer-guitarist Lee Ranaldo builds great waves of abrasive sound and melody to signify warmth and feeling on "Walkin' Blue" with a brief, but recurring vocal harmony that may be the first-ever echo of pure Beatles pop on a Sonic Youth album.

The music remains ageless and weird, fueled on chaos and clarity, but these are songs, not sound experiments for their own sake. Indie or not, Sonic Youth knows how to follow its wild trips into confusion and still be at peace with high-octane form and function.

-- Steve Appleford

Sonic Youth
"The Eternal"
Matador
Four stars

Can someone hook this one up for me, I never got around to picking it up and have heard mostly good things about it.

This is going to be it for this Thanksgiving weekend. I will start it back up on Monday, then post a couple every day until the end of the year. On the weekends I'm going to venture into some other types of music like Rap, Hip-Hop, R&B, Pop and even Metal.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone, be safe!

Great record, and as I said before--it was as though some weight was lifted off of them.

I've actually come back to this multiple times, something I haven't done since the 90s.

some great tunes, but it could have been a whole lot better.

love it--definitely going to be in one of my top-two spots for the year.

if you like melody and harmony you are guaranteed to be annoyed by this band