Sonic Youth’s ‘The Eternal’ returns to indie ground

Sonic Youth

“The Eternal”

Matador

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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

Elation clearly shines through

Mos Def

“The Ecstatic”

Downtown Records

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In 2006, MC-cum-actor Mos Def released the titularly misleading “True Magic,” an uninspired last gasp with Geffen Records that would’ve been more accurately dubbed “Contractual Obligation.” But “The Ecstatic,” his fourth solo album, mostly lives up to its giddy name with Bollywood-style samples and off-kilter production from Stones Throw stars Madlib and his brother Oh No, and the late J Dilla.

It also showcases Mos Def’s most engaged lyrical flow in years -- positive in spirit and some of it looking back, as he does on “History” with his former Black Star compatriot Talib Kweli. Set to a crooked Dilla beat that reshuffles itself more cleverly than the average loop, “History” concludes with one of Mos Def’s cerebral rhyme-strands and then segues into “Casa Bey,” which pits chugging samba funk against optimistic, misty-eyed piano traces.

At its start, “The Ecstatic” is more aggressive and a little spooky. The atmospheric “Auditorium” is built from a track off of Madlib’s “Beat Konducta in India” series and features a captivating guest appearance from Slick Rick in which he imagines himself as a soldier in Iraq. “Quiet Dog Bite Hard” is a stark but shimmying rumbler made for Brooklyn mean streets.

“The Ecstatic” flags in spots and the album’s tricky samples take a while to absorb. But the 16-song collection offers proof that Mos Def can still be invigorated from a tight beat as much as a tightly written script.

-- Margaret Wappler

In country, but different roads

Todd Snider

“The Excitement Plan”

(Yep Roc)

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Darryl Worley

“Sounds Like Life”

(Stroudavarious)

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New releases from alt-country singer-songwriter Todd Snider and country singer Darryl Worley provide a stellar case study in the difference between those who look at music as an avenue for creative expression and those who look for hits.

Snider, 42, is an eminently gifted Oregon-born, Nashville-based writer who wields a well-developed sense of humor akin to John Prine and Tom Waits. He sketches colorful characters and situations, part fact, part fiction, in the tradition of narrative folk blues, his songs generally coming down more on the side of Prine’s hapless Everyman than Waits’ down-and-out barflies.

“America’s Favorite Pastime” is a hoot of a true story about Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis’ fabled 1970 no-hitter, which he pitched after he’d dropped LSD. “You don’t necessarily have to pay the fiddler to dance,” he sings in “Slim Chance,” an upbeat celebration of the kind of person who slips through life on the grace of good fortune. He wrote “Don’t Tempt Me” with Loretta Lynn, who adds a sprightly and sassy duet vocal to their bouncy barrelhouse warning about maintaining fidelity.

It’s a lively, beautifully individualized collection of observations about the perplexing journey that is life on Earth.

The title of Worley’s album, on the other hand, unintentionally provides a revealing clue about this 44-year-old Tennessean’s approach, “like” being one of those habitually misused words that means “similar to, but not.” There’s little on his latest collection that rings true of real lives actually being lived, but much that points out what’s wrong about contemporary commercial country music.

The first single, “Sounds Like Life to Me” aspires toward a grab-your-own-bootstraps message about bucking up in trying times, but for the sake of lyric expediency lumps the anguish of placing a parent in a nursing home alongside such nuisances as a broken-down car.

“Tequila on Ice” sets up an alcohol-fueled romantic fantasy with neither the humor nor underlying sense of real-world consequence that Snider brings to Robert Earl Keen’s “Corpus Christi Bay,” about a pair of brothers who pursue the Jimmy Buffett/Kenny Chesney lifestyle to its sad but credible real-world conclusion.

Guess which one’s likely to be the hit?

-- Randy Lewis