Precisely on cue, I ran across some newspaper review of this album which said (almost word for word) “for the first time in their long career, Sonic Youth offer up nothing new.” Either these reviews are written by people who have heard of Sonic Youth and then are surprised that the music is rather pleasing and the songs are mostly standard rock songs – or – hindsight allows people to see that actually Sonic Youth have always been tinkering with their formula.

So I shall now offer my very different review. Here is what’s new about Sonic Youth’s music. These changes have been brewing for a few albums, but here’s what’s happened. About a decade back, they brought in a 5th member, Jim O’Rourke, to play keyboards. That actually resulted in one of my least favorite albums, “NYC Ghosts and Flowers” which I find kind of rambling and directionless. But after some messing around with this line-up, O’Rourke switched to bass guitar.

This brought in a significant new element. First of all, with Kim Gordon on guitar, the guitar-work could be even a bit denser and more intertwined. More importantly, O’Rourke’s straight-up musicianship added a stronger melodic element to Sonic Youth songs. They now have a new bassist (Mark Ibold, previously of Pavement) but he continues very much in the same style. Note the bass playing in the middle and end of “Anti-Orgasm” on this album, which uses these fast little (I think those are called) scales - comletely unlike anything Kim would play. The bass is also played clean, so these additions are subtle, almost subconscious, especially with those trademark guitars up front.

Another change is that Sonic Youth have officially moved beyond their song-noise-song pattern. Instead of a song that goes along for a while, then turns into a storm of noise, then returns to the song (or you can change up the order), the noise and music is now fully integrated. Guitar noises work in service of the songs.

This formula was mostly in place with “Sonic Nurse,” a couple of albums ago. It got stripped down a bit with the lighter-sounding “Rather Ripped,” and now some more grungey chunkiness has been mixed back in and we get “The Eternal.” Everything you’d want from a classic Sonic Youth album is here in this new, refined form. Some unsettling moods, rock’n'roll moves, teenage poetry, some breezy and genuinely pretty tunes, a couple of great Lee songs, a few good guitar squalls. A solid, satisfying album. Different too. Subtly, but different. Like always.

CD and LP on Matador Records.

www.sonicyouth.com

The subtitle of this album is somewhat misleading. “B-sides and rarities” suggests that there is going to be some stuff dug up from across SY’s long career. And aren’t all the b-sides compiled on some other release by now? Well, that’s not really what we have here. This is basically a bunch of jams recorded in more recent years that didn’t have anywhere else to go but were too good to just throw away.

If you enjoyed Sonic Youth’s last few records (“Rather Ripped,” “Sonic Nurse,” “Murray Street”) then you will be really happy to get this record, which is essentially the outtakes. Improvised jams and songs that didn’t quite make it. I’m pretty stoked about this because I think those are some of SY’s best releases since (insert favorite old-school SY album here). If you did lose track of what they were doing X albums back, I’d recommend at least checking in again.

There are a couple of tracks I could live without. “Campfire” is some kind of ambient electronic track from a compilation and sounds to me like it’s just filling space here. There’s also a new, extended “Diamond Sea,” the already rather long track from the end of “Washing Machine.” Since we already got some 15 minutes worth of the very same recording on that album, I would rather have gotten more totally unheard material here.

But I’m pretty happy because the bulk of this is blissful, breezily dissonant and eezily rockin’ Sonic Jams. Good tour driving music, drinking coffee on the porch late Sunday morning music. (Or maybe oil-painting in your over-priced “East Williamsburg” loft to the track “Fauxhemians?”)