These reviews ran way back when at Knoxville Metropulse; I think they’ve since gone off the web.
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Legion of Two
Riffs
Planet Mu

I have to admit that cranky, middle-aged rock-critic me is not completely up-to-the-minute on this dubstep stuff the kids are so crazy about. Still, as a fan of black and doom metal, I felt right at home in Alan O’ Boyle and David Lacey’s trudging apocalypse. Sure, here the zombie Vikings have been replaced by giant, digitally controlled cement mixers crushing you beneath their inevitable tread, while the gutteral squawls of tortured werewolves have given way to hissing jets of infernal steam and the occasional free jazz ensemble being quietly and painfully assimilated in the background. And, yes, I’ll admit that there are a couple of nods to electronica’s blissful leanings, as at the beginning of “Turning Point,” where the swirling synths head for lighter, more Enya-friendly territory and the live percussion loosens up into a funkier stut.

Not that I have anything against that sort of thing.

Still, I was pleased when the last track demonstrated once and for all that the duo really do have as bleak and blackened a pair of hearts as any metalhead could ask for — “Cast Out Your Demons” descends into a hissing, howling ambient sludge, where even the ominously heavy percussion is swallowed up by ghostly shrieks and gaping despair. It kind of brings a tear to my aging eyes to realize that, even after all this time, the youth today still want to drown the world in its own boiling filth.

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Sonic Youth
The Eternal

The last Sonic Youth album I spent any time at all with was Washing Machine from way, way back in 1995. The Eternal picks up exactly where we left off though…and that’s kind of a problem.

If any band was about sounding up to the minute, that band was the aptly named Sonic Youth. They were dissonant, they were cool as shit, and, most of all, they were surprising. Even on the post-classic period Washing Machine they seemed to be trying new things, as when they buried the album’s best pop hook in the 19 minute swathe of noise that was “The Diamond Sea.”

For an avant-band like Sonic Youth, that kind of “fuck-you” isn’t a bug; it’s the whole point. You’re there to have them set you back on your heels, either with the uncompromising but earthy squall of their early albums, or with the way they turned sneering political protest into breathy celebration and back again on Dirty’s “Swimsuit Issue.”

All of which is to say that The Eternal is the one thing that a Sonic Youth album should never be. It’s predictable. Not that it’s a Metallica-level embarrassment — “Leaky Lifeboat” has a pretty, almost classical picked motif; “Antenna” is catchy as hell. But the music doesn’t do anything the band wasn’t doing already fifteen years ago. Merle Haggard can get away with that sort of thing because his music is about tradition and fidelity. But Sonic Youth is about something else. And if you can’t stay young, “The Eternal” starts to sound like a very long and very tedious slog.