CD reviews for June 26, 2009

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music critic
• Published: Jun 26, 2009

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Sonic Youth
THE ETERNAL
Sonic Youth’s sonically bold discography influenced many younger bands. Long past its youth, Sonic Youth nevertheless lives on with The Eternal, a 12-song CD that blends the band’s artful noise with consistently appealing songs framed in more or less conventional rock and pop structure.

Punk-rock drive meets dissonance and lyrics recited by the husky-toned Kim Gordon in The Eternal’s opening blast, “Sacred Trickster.” Gordon’s band mate and husband, Thurston Moore, shares vocals with her for the multi-sectioned “Anti-Orgasm,” an extended composition that ranges from garage-rock to psychedelic freak-out to mellowed-out musing. Moore sings again for “Antenna,” a dreamy pop song clouded in atmospherics produced in part by a pair of analogue radios.

Besides pop hooks and noise, The Eternal rocks with the swaggering “Poison Arrow” and the U2 bigness of “What We Know.” “Walkin’ Blue” features the New York City-spawned noise-rockers seemingly time-tripping west to a night in San Francisco, circa 1968. Appropriately enough, the latter song works especially well when paired with the colorful patterns generated by Windows media player.

Various artists
WOODSTOCK/WOODSTOCK TWO
With the 40th anniversary of 1969’s Woodstock Music and Art Fair less than two months away, reissues of the 1970 Woodstock soundtrack and 1971’s Woodstock Two present a chance to, depending upon one’s age, revisit that massive cultural event or experience it for the first time. Some 500,000 people attended the festival but countless more felt as if they’d been there after watching Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning Woodstock documentary.

The film’s original soundtrack remains a telling snapshot of the era, including late ’60s idealism, anti-Vietnam War sentiment and drug references. A heavy music lineup, too: Super group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young playing only their second gig; Jimi Hendrix one month before his death; funk masters Sly and the Family Stone; Britain’s Who; San Francisco veterans Jefferson Airplane and new Bay Area band, Santana, in a star-making performance of “Soul Sacrifice.” Between-song banter and stage announcements further echo the tone of the times.

The departed Hendrix opens Woodstock Two with three tracks that aren’t his best work. Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young make encore appearances and heavy rock band Mountain and folkie Melanie make respectable first appearances. But Woodstock Two, an understandable attempt to cash in on the popularity of the film and original three-LP soundtrack, isn’t the best of Woodstock.