[Moshe]

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/articl...deluxe-edition



Sonic Youth
Daydream Nation: Deluxe Edition
[Enigma; 1988; r: Geffen; 2007]
Rating: 10.0

I don't expect to hear too many complaints about the rating above. Daydream Nation is a great uniter: You'd be hard pressed to find many fans of indie rock who don't have some love for this record. That's partly because this record is great, sure-- that's one boring reason-- but it's also because this record is one of a handful that helped shape the notion of what American indie rock can potentially mean. It's almost a tautology: Indie fans love Daydream Nation because loving stuff like Daydream Nation is part of how we define what indie fans are.

Not that there wasn't plenty of underground music in the U.S. before this album's 1988 release-- hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes. But the notion that all those Reagan-era discontents might be in the same boat-- a new Alternative Nation just beginning to converge-- hadn't yet been fully articulated. Sonic Youth sensed that convergence in the making, and they were pretty sure it had something to do with Dinosaur Jr.: "A new aesthetic of youth culture", Thurston Moore called it in Matthew Stearns' 33 1/3 book about the album, "wherein anger and distaste, attributes associated with punk energy, were coolly replaced by head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance." Right. So the band writes the most glorious, accessible pop song of its career, calling it "J Mascis for President"-- i.e., an underground-rock campaign song-- and it kicks off this record under the title "Teen Age Riot". What does that sound like if not the grand calling-together of a nascent underground audience?

Sonic Youth don't set the song up as a call to arms. Instead, Thurston, singing, is in bed, just like you might be while listening to it-- or to Bug, or Surfer Rosa, or Isn’t Anything, all of which came out the previous year. Just two motes of potential energy, both waiting for Mascis to "Come running in on platform shoes/ With [his] Marshall stack/ To at least just give us a clue." The video for this song contains more images of musicians who aren't in Sonic Youth than musicians who are: Ian MacKaye, Patti Smith, Mark E. Smith, Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Sun Ra, Daniel Johnston, Neil Young, the Beach Boys-- a crash course in what still, almost 20 years later, looks like an indie canon.

Following that, the band spends this double album managing to inhabit just about every major strain of the underground, collecting and referencing each facet of what this "new youth culture" might look like:

• avant-garde Downtown NYC new music, complete with odd harmonic collisions and screwdrivers wedged in guitars
• hardcore punk sneering and double-time drumbeats
• good old off-kilter, accessible collegiate pop music
• gorgeous, oceanic "head-in-the-clouds outer limits" guitar stuff, which-- along with the previous year's releases from My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr., and the Pixies-- would define indie rock's guitar vocabulary as much as anything this side of Joy Division/New Order
• high-art, film, and literary references, ranging from the album cover (a Gerhard Richter painting) to the lyrics (which borrow from an Andy Warhol film and books by Harry Crews and Denis Johnson-- and this is before Denis Johnson published Jesus’ Son)
• giant tongue-near-cheek rock gestures, like including a three-part "trilogy" and four Led Zeppelin-style icons representing the band members
• slacker poses and goofy skater-kid trash culture
• ambitious art-world braininess
• this
• that
• the other

All melted down into one lump: "Seamless" isn't even the word.

Of course, now that a whole genre's grown out from Daydream Nation'sroots, all its "difficult" sounds, modified guitars, and strange collisions have become de riguer, invisible, and normalized, more clearly revealing the shimmering pop epics that always lay beneath. What's really shocking is the energy of it. This record's default setting is the place most rock bands try to work up to around the third chorus-- guitar players veering off into neck-strangling improvisations, singers dropping off the melody and into impassioned shouts. These songs start there and just stay. Usually the guitars spend a few bars wandering off and into sideways tangles, choking out their harmonies, and then come back together and spend a few bars pinning down the riff: On "'Cross the Breeze", that means Kim Gordon keeps returning to the same refrain, each time grunting it more insistently than the last. Sometimes they don't even stay there: Lee Ranaldo's "Hey Joni" starts off already on some next level of energy, and then Lee shouts "kick it!" and the band ratchets up to some next next level, and then he coasts up to one exhilarating shouted "HEY!" and the band bursts through a ceiling higher than you could have imagined at the start of the track. It's the kind of transcendent glory that crosses genres and even arts: that same in-the-zone feeling you get from a be-bop combo in top gear, a rapper at the absolute clear-eyed peak of his game-- hell, even an athlete in perfect function.

Lyrically, it's Thurston who turns in the rock slacker trash: When he's not just lying in bed, he's wandering around downtown Manhattan, getting mugged, blowing up amplifiers, and talking in a stoned skater-kid argot ("you got to fake out the robot!"). Lee, being Lee, exists on some more mystical future/past plane, located in dreams and open fields instead of on the Bowery. Kim's lyrics are the brutal, terrifying ones, each song outlining a flirtation with some demonic jerk. In "Kissability", it's a rotten entertainment mogul, pledging "you could be a star" and probably playing with himself under his desk. In "Eliminator Jr", it's Robert Chambers, the teenage rich-kid "Preppy Murderer", and a horrible little shit even before he raped and strangled Jennifer Levin behind the Met in Central Park. In "'Cross the Breeze", it may be the devil himself.
This reissue does what reissues have to do these days, raising the volume to compete with all the over-compressed new stuff on your mp3 player. Someone's clearly taken care with the process, making sure not to spoil the wide dynamics of this music, but this kind of re-master isn't the best fit for the open-room feel of the original: I'd be lying if I said the crystalline brambles of guitar in these songs didn't suffer a little from being flattened out like this. (Steve Shelley's busy, subtle drumming gets a particularly raw deal.) Mild audiophiles-- or anyone attached to the feel of the original CD and LP issues-- might want to spring for the vinyl re-release.

On the plus side, this package is well aware that Daydream Nation is for celebrating Daydream Nation, and that there are already record stores where you can spend a year's salary on Sonic Youth rarities. Never mind the four covers included, or the home demo of "Eric's Trip" that quietly fades out the album disc: The treat, for this album's devotees, is a terrific, seamless collection of album-contemporary live performances, touching on every song on the album. (Yes, even "Providence".) It's a thrill, and not just for those who've heard this record enough times to need a fresh perspective. Daydream Nation was one great, liberated scribble on the mostly blank slate of what underground rock was starting to become, and through these tracks you get to hear the band take it out on the road and show it to everyone-- playing loose, sliding energetically through things they made precise on record. And, 12 tracks in, taking their J Mascis campaign song on a Straight Talk Expressway to Yr Skull.
-Nitsuh Abebe, June 13, 2007

[atsonicpark]

I PREfER THIS PoST CuZ I DON't HAVe tO Go To PiTCHFORK tO SEE it.

[guitarpro]

Cool shit DDN is a great album

[Moshe]

Steve, Lee and Michael Azerrad talk about the album:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck...2#segment80406

[noisereductions]

Pitchfork is so f'ing predictable... if you put out an album they'll give you 7 maybe. If you re-issue it, they'll give you a 10. see: Fennesz, Pavement, SY and so on.

[Moshe]

http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=56341&v=3639471811


Burning the Candle at Both Ends
Pop

BY STEVE DOLLAR
June 12, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/56341


Something spooky always animated "Daydream Nation." The cover of Sonic Youth's 1988 doublealbum — released back when the vinyl format had not fully yielded to the CD, whose 80-minute capacity made the concept obsolete — was a 1983 painting by Gerhard Richter: a single tall white candle aflame before a textured whitishgray background. The symbolism could be anything: time burning down, a transient glow amid nocturnal shadows, yet another arty reference to show off the band's cool taste.
Regardless, the image cast a spell before the music even began. And once it did, the spell would not shake. "Spirit of desire … we will fall," intones bassist Kim Gordon as the music kicks up — a song called "Teenage Riot." Guitars chime slowly, building momentum around an incantation that evokes the Stooges' 1969 song "We Will Fall." (The piece is famous for a mad viola freakout courtesy of producer John Cale, who threw down a jam to fill up the remaining 11 minutes of the "No Fun" album's running time.) After more than a minute of spectral emanation, the guitars erupt in an ecstatic tumble of overtones and driving rhythm, a suspended instant meant to send bodies flailing into the mosh pit (how quaint, you're thinking now). "Its getting kind of quiet in my city's head," guitarist Thurston Moore sings, paradoxically, amid the tumult. "Takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed right now."
Nearly 20 years later, a lifetime in pop culture, Sonic Youth is inciting the riot again — reliving a pop moment that is now legitimately ghostly. The reissue of "Daydream Nation" (as a raritiespacked double-CD edition) heralds a summer tour that finds the band playing the album's songs live, in sequence, at such events as the Pitchfork Media Festival in Chicago (pitchforkmedia.com, the alternately revered and reviled indie tastemaker, recently named "Daydream Nation" the greatest album of the 1980s) and the McCarren Park Pool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
The album, Sonic Youth's fifth and last before signing a major-label deal with Geffen Records, marked a clear turning point for the band, a once-abstract noise act that bridged the '80s downtown art scene to the more populist precincts of the American independent rock movement: the missing link between John Cage and Black Flag. When Mr. Moore sings about hitting "the riot trail," he means it's time to get in the van and play the circuit of grimy clubs that were the outfit's natural habitat. Dig up a tattered copy of Forced Exposure, the fanzine published by Mr. Moore's friend Byron Coley, and you can read brutally funny tour diaries from the day, also documented in Michael Azerrad's 2002 indierock history "This Band Could Be Your Life."
Sonic Youth has recorded another 10 albums since "Daydream Nation," but with the exception of its 1990 follow-up "Goo" — notable for its flirtation with the pop crossover that the band's Seattle grunge protégés were about to achieve — none of them beg strongly to be revisited. Partly because the group was still underground, and partly because the record sounded like a reach, like it meant to be a statement, its textural wash of overloaded amplifiers, unconventional guitar tunings, full-throttle jamming, and inchoate lyrics has always meant something, even when it is difficult to say exactly what. In 1988, Mr. Moore left a cryptic message on my answering machine with a few verbal footnotes about the songs: "The Sprawl" was a nod to cyberpunk novelist William Gibson's future concept of the East Coast as one endless city; "The Wonder" was what another novelist, James Ellroy, called Los Angeles; "Eliminator Jr" hot-wired ZZ Top choogle to Dinosaur Jr. thrash.
Listening back, the album's pleasures abide in the gleaming cohesion of the band's aesthetic. It's the way everything meshes on "Silver Rocket," which shifts from a muscular, speedy intro to a white-noise jam session and back again, at once visceral and hallucinatory. It's the cold erotic intensity of Ms. Gordon's vocals on "Kissability," propelled by the tight, sustained pulse of Steve Shelley's drums. And it's the blatantly sexual opening to "Eliminator Jr.," in which Ms. Gordon emotes in guttural "uhh" sounds as the band jackknifes around her. Mostly, it's the ease with which the musicians master a dynamic that moves fluidly between a kind of metallic impressionism — sustained notes, spare rhythms — and multi-guitar grooves that swing and spiral.
The reissue of "Daydream Nation" offers a bonus disc, which has concert versions of the studio tracks and oddities like Sonic Youth's cover of the Beatles' "Within You, Without You." None of this is essential, though it is fun to hear, especially during the abstractions of "The Sprawl," a chiming interlude that recalls one of just-intonation composer Arnold Dreyblatt's pieces for his Orchestra of Excited Strings. It's a sign that Sonic Youth has always been more alternative than the daydream nation it helped to invent, a culture that survived the co-option of the 1990s and now thrives in the post-major label era of MySpace and file sharing. "Daydream Nation" may sound like a flashback, but its candle still burns.

[noisereductions]

http://www.prefixmag.com/reviews/cds...e-edition/3087

[Moshe]

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/r...ydream-nation/

Sonic Youth

Daydream Nation

[Deluxe Edition]

(Geffen)

US release date: 12 June 2007

UK release date: 2 July 2007


by Adrien Begrand

• cover art by Gerhard Richter, and continuing with the whopping 71 minutes of music therein, Sonic Youth’s sixth album brazenly attempted to be iconic when it first came out in the fall of 1988, and it succeeded on every level. Similar to what the Velvet Underground did on The Velvet Underground and Nico in 1967, and Television on Marquee Moon in 1977, Daydream Nation achieves the kind of musical trifecta that so perfectly suits a band hailing from New York City, in which the avant-garde, the primal, and the pop-oriented coalesce into one groundbreaking whole.

A bombastic double album featuring “Zoso"-style pictographs and boasting a prog-inspired “trilogy”, it’s a celebration of classic heavy rock at its most garish, but at the same time, it’s a snarky send-up of those very dinosaur rock clichés. The lyrics are either oblique, or poetic, or celebratory, or confrontational. Guitars boogie one minute, elicit discordant screams the next, and chime away quixotically the next. One member sings bleary-eyed melodies, one sings in a sultry, tone-deaf voice, and another can’t sing at all. Yet despite sounding like a complete mess when trying to describe it, the execution on the album is so flawless, it doesn’t seem bloated or unfocused; not a second is wasted. Daydream Nation was greeted with instant, universal praise, from mainstream publications to underground fanzines, canonized seemingly hours after its birth. And contrary to what some revisionist cranks might want to claim, it’s every bit as great as its many admirers say it is.




When 1992’s Dirty became the first Sonic Youth album to receive the Deluxe Edition treatment by Universal four years ago, while it was deserving of such a repackaging, many people, including yours truly, thought, “Thanks, but where’s Daydream Nation?” After 2005’s similarly admirable re-release of 1990’s major label debut Goo, the wait is over for nostalgic Gen X-ers, as the band’s gratest moment on wax comes remastered, repackaged, and overflowing with bonus material. So now the anticipation can cease, and the obsessive debating of whether or not they did a good job on the reissue can begin.
First, and most importantly, is the original album, which has been given a nice spit and polish, the remastering good but nothing overly bold; if anything, continuing with the current trend of making CDs sound louder (besides, the real audiophiles will be clamoring for the upcoming deluxe vinyl edition). Following the lead of two other highly influential double albums of the 1980s, Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade and the Minutemen</I>‘s Double Nickels on the Dime, Daydream Nation couldn’t be contained by one individual LP, requiring for sides to convey everything Sonic Youth, who was at the height of its creative powers, had to say. As mentioned earlier, the fusion of high art, brute force, and accessibility was crucial, not to mention prescient; along with Dinosaur Jr.’s Your Living All Over Me and the Pixies’ Doolittle, the latter of which released in 1989, Daydream Nation helped clear the metaphorical table in anticipation of what would be a veritable feast of 1990s music, from grunge, to the mainstream-accepted alternative rock, to America’s exploding indie underground.
The ferocity of the album is still palpable nearly 20 years after the fact: “Silver Rocket” is a balls-out scorcher, “‘Cross the Breeze” teases us with wistful guitars at the beginning only to be usurped by an arrangement that borders on hardcore and metal (interestingly enough, guitarist Thurston Moore mentions the song’s influence on underground black metal band Bone Awl in the liner notes), and “Trilogy” brings the album to a careening, harrowing conclusion, highlighted by the murky “Hyperstation” and the cacophonous “Eliminator Jr.”. Bassist Kim Gordon has never sounded better on record before or since, perfecting her über-cool feminist persona both vocally and lyrically, satirizing American consumer culture on “The Sprawl”, bluntly depicting New York’s infamous 1986 “Preppie Murder” on “Eliminator Jr.”, and targeting the entertainment industry on the acid-tongued “Kissability”. Guitarist Lee Ranaldo’s three tracks prove to be the most lyrically rewarding, his Dylan and Kerouac-inspired spontaneous poetry dominating the Eric Emerson-inspired “Eric’s Trip”, the paranoid “Rain King”, and especially the famous Joni Mitchell paean “Hey Joni”, which features his most inspired wordplay ("She’s a beautiful mental jukebox / A sailboat explosion / A snap of electric whipcrack").
It’s Moore’s songs, though, that form the core of Daydream Nation, which walk the line between catchy and experimental with astounding deftness. “Total Trash” incorporates a charmingly wonky boogie-woogie riff reminiscent of T. Rex before veering off onto a frenzied noise rock tangent, eventually righting itself at the six minute mark. “Candle” is famous for its wistful, drop-dead gorgeous guitar intro, but the last four minutes of the song feature Sonic Youth at its most optimistic and, dare I say, breezy ("Wind is whipping through my stupid mop"). Nothing, though, compares to the timeless “Teen Age Riot”. One of the great slacker anthems of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, it began as a tribute to Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis, right down to Moore’s laconic vocal delivery, but as the years have gone on, it’s come to symbolize the collective shrug of a jaded generation stuck having to live with baby boomer nostalgia, Reaganomics, and no cause of its own, and no war to protest against ("Takes a teen age riot to get me out of bed right now"), its only raison d’etre being the glorious release of rock music ("Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer that’s rockin’ / And a cord and a pedal and a lock, that’ll do me for now"). With an ebullient band performance that sounds part Lou Reed, part New Order, part Dino Jr., and boasting the most hummable melody in the entire Sonic Youth discography, it is simply perfect, one of the greatest opening tracks in rock ‘n’ roll history.
While the set’s bonus tracks are copious, to the tune of 81 minutes’ worth, there’s nothing especially revealing. Aside from a very beguiling, intimate solo run-through of “Eric’s Trip” by Ranaldo, no demos were recorded for the album, the foursome deciding to hammer out their new songs during a series of club dates in the early summer of 1988. The collection of live recordings, featuring performances of every Daydream Nation song (haphazardly assembled from six separate sets from June 1988 to March 1989), is a mixed bag, albeit a compelling one. “The Sprawl”, “Silver Rocket”, “Hyperstation”, and “Eliminator Jr.” all manage to either match or top the intensity of the album versions, and “Teen Age Riot” and “Candle” are faithfully performed. On the flipside, “Eric’s Trip” suffers from Ranaldo’s weak vocal delivery, while “‘Cross the Breeze” is hindered by a rather weak performance by the rhythm section of Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley. The most interesting live cut is a looser, more free-form version of “Total Trash”, shown in its early stages during one of the band’s famous pre-studio club dates. Four covers are also tossed in, ranging from the somewhat straightforward rendition of the Beatles’ “Within You Without You”, a fun run-through of Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick”, Captain Beefheart’s “Electricity”, and clearly the best of the lot, a raging performance of Neil Young’s “Computer Age”.
Presented in an appealing four-panel digipak, its matte finish suiting the softness of Richter’s front and back cover paintings perfectly, and containing liner notes by band cohort Byron Coley and former Homestead Records A&R man Ray Farrell that, while overtly reverent, stop just short of fawning, the deluxe edition of Daydream Nation presents fans with the usual conundrum: is it worth the exorbitant $30 price tag? While this deluxe edition does not shed any new light on Daydream Nation, the sheer strength of the original album itself more than makes up for any slight shortcomings on the bonus disc. Once in a rare while, an album is special enough to warrant shelling out a little extra for some appealing packaging, liner notes, and decent extras, and this landmark record is one of them.

10 out of 10

[Moshe]

http://www.prefixmag.com/reviews/cds...e-edition/3087

8.5/10

[Moshe]

Originally Posted by Moshe

Steve, Lee and Michael Azerrad talk about the album:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck...2#segment80406

this radio interview is available for download in mp3 format:

http://audio.wnyc.org/soundcheck/sou...061207apod.mp3

[pantophobia]

http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/...aydream_nation


Loosed on the world in 1988, Daydream Nation made alt-rock a life force. Over two vinyl discs containing just fourteen titles, it fused Sonic Youth's displaced guitar tunings with tunes as hummable as the Beatles' or the Ramones' – a standard they've matched ever since, but never again with quite so much anthemic consistency. The album's evident mastery won them a major-label deal they're still working even though their three singers have never shown any commercial potential. And soon they persuaded Geffen to sign a band whose singer did: Nirvana.
Heard today, Daydream Nation's evocation of sonic youths with talent to burn and nowhere to build a fire is clearly rooted in the specifics of a Manhattan bohemia since transformed by Internet money and real estate sharks. Post-irony, its confusion-as-sex seems almost innocent. But its tunings keep it honest and its anthems keep it thrilling. A terrific bonus disc compiles covers that do justice to the band's ambition – Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick," Neil Young's "Computer Age," the Beatles' "Within You Without You" – and unearths live versions of every Daydream Nation song. These are rough, intense, welcome. But the studio versions are definitive, as dense as cluster bombs. "Your life is such a mess/Forget the past, and just say yes"? "You can buy some more and more and more and more"? As words, admissions of futility. Atop marshaled guitars, artistic war cries.



ROBERT CHRISTGAU
(Posted: Jun 13, 2007)

[atsonicpark]

A terrific bonus disc compiles covers that do justice to the band's ambition – Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick," Neil Young's "Computer Age," the Beatles' "Within You Without You" –

Odd that "Electricity" wasn't listed there, and it's the best of the four...

[Moshe]

http://www.chicagoreader.com/feature...s/2007/070615/

SONIC YOUTH'S DAYDREAM Nation is my favorite album, and has been since the first time I heard it. Or, actually, the second. The first time I didn't realize the batteries in my Walkman were dying, and after a few minutes of slurred behemoth clang, I passed the tape back to Andrew Semans, complaining that it was too weird and slow. It was 1989 or '90 and I was in ninth grade, and Andrew had introduced me to punk rock just the week before with a mix tape that included the likes of Chrome and the Butthole Surfers, so it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that a band might sound like a lawn mower underwater.
After a little enlightenment and a battery change, I tried again. Andrew had told me to listen for the 59-second noise break in "Silver Rocket." I timed it by the sweep hand on the clock in the guidance counselor's office. I'd come to Sonic Youth pretty much straight from Tracy Chapman and Deee-Lite, and the idea of "noise" as music was mindbreaking. That was it -- I was sold.
Earlier this week, for the third time in 19 years, Daydream Nation was reissued, and the new version is a "deluxe" double-disc set with a whole disc of bonus tracks. Sonic Youth are admittedly an archivist band and the album is undeniably a classic, but what's going to sell this reissue isn't the remastering job or even the stuff from the vaults. The real drivers here are the nostalgia of aging punks and indie rockers and the borrowed memories of kids born too late and hungry for a connection to that bygone era. It's not hard to turn those feelings into money, but to trigger them you need a fresh product.
Accordingly, the past nine months alone have seen the release of a documentary about the glory days of American hardcore and deluxe reissues and reunion shows from Sebadoh, Chavez, and Young Marble Giants. Dinosaur Jr is on the road behind a new record, the reunited Slint is touring again -- this time re-creating the 1991 album Spiderland -- and the Meat Puppets, Afghan Whigs, and Slits have gotten back together in one form or another.
This cultural recycling keeps us stuck in the past, where we're forever 21, favorite bands are kept like secrets, and scenes are protected from co-optation by their sheer inaccessibility. Though technological advances -- in particular the Internet -- have all but obliterated the potential for a band or a scene to be private or personal, they also fuel our yearning for the time when we last felt that special connection. The same technology that's steamrolling what feels important and particular to us also makes it easier to escape into nostalgia. It provides new and improved reproductions of our memories and makes them easy to share in perpetuity throughout the universe.
This gets extra weird when it comes to punk rock. Punk is nihilistic music made by angry kids, and its nature is to die, to be extinguished, to destroy itself. But once the angry kids grow up, the rules change. When you grow up, you learn that the losers don't write history, so old punks engage in historical revisionism, recasting themselves as brave visionaries in order to be remembered by the mainstream.
Sonic Youth might be America's oldest living punk band, approaching their 30th year, so you could argue that they really are winners, with the prerogative to tell their own story. Having outlasted New York no wave, SST punk, pigfuck noise, and Nirvana-era alternative rock, they now stand alone, totemic and anomalous. Perhaps for lack of a real-world career model in the indie world (the Minutemen approach stopped being viable circa 1995), they're taking cues from classic rockers. Beginning with the 2003 reissue of Dirty, they've been upgrading and boxing up their classics, buffing their wares to a showroom shine. The band may see this as a way to make rarities available to fans who aren't eBay sickos, but it reminds me of the way a piano salesman softens up a retiree by playing golden oldies. Once you tap into those feelings, you can sell people all kinds of things they don't need.
Most of the time it's not even a tough sell. There are apparently hordes of folks anxious to fan the flames of nostalgia with their federal notes. On their current tour Sonic Youth are playing Daydream Nation in its entirety, and the day they headline the Pitchfork festival, July 13, is the only one that's already totally sold out. (On the same bill are Slint, playing Spiderland, and the GZA, performing 1995's Liquid Swords.) The crowd at the Dinosaur Jr show I saw a couple weeks ago, also sold out, was thick with middle-aged men, some wearing ragged relic T-shirts, others dressed more in keeping with their maturity and affluence -- tucked-in collared shirts, pleated slacks, active sandals.
It's easier to take comfort in the things that were meaningful to you in the past than to risk feeling alienated by the new, but you can sink into absurdity doing it. One of the two sets of liner notes to this edition of Daydream Nation is another dull procedural courtesy of the band's friend Byron Coley (can't they find some other chores for him to do?), and both his and the band's remarks exude a wistfulness that's alarmingly intense given that "back in the day" is only 1988. Sonic Youth waxing elegiac about a New York City littered with crackheads and burning mattresses, in the golden era before gentrification drove sandwich prices above five bucks, is just shy of offensive.
Given that Sonic Youth have never really fallen out of favor with critics or the public and are still actively evolving on their new albums, it seems incredibly self-serving for them to be so eagerly pimping their past triumphs. Is it only because they've never stopped oozing good taste and credibility that we don't dare point out that they're working the underground the way a washed-up one-hit wonder works the state-fair circuit? And to what end? They're already so thoroughly canonized that they're guaranteed an audience long after they stop playing.
What's to be gained by the remastering of this masterpiece? We loved Daydream Nation all along, even in its savage predigital state, and it's hard to hear much of a difference on the disc that contains the fiercely perfect studio album. The second disc is mostly unreleased live versions of the songs, plus a few covers recorded around the same time. With Thurston and Lee launching peacock plumes of detuned guitar, Kim groaning tough and flipping patriarchal paradigms, and Steve Shelley pounding as if to remind us that his hardcore days are only just behind him, it's a great addition to the band's catalog. It doesn't, however, give a listener any new insight, doesn't add any meaning to the original artifact. Daydream Nation was -- and is -- a brilliant record and a cultural touchstone. But buying the whole new Daydream Nation nostalgia package, and the late-80s/early-90s nostalgia fest in general, feels pathetic -- like sandbagging against encroaching obsolescence with our wallets.

[something]

"they make the beatles sound GOOD"

[Moshe]

http://www.imposemagazine.com/mag/?p=985

By Jeremy Krinsley
As the streets of Brooklyn flood with the rent-raising gentry and another Whole Foods springs up blocks from the Eldridge Street railroad apartment where recent newlyweds Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon spent their hot summer days of 1988 alongside junky casualties of the crack epidemic, the conditions under which Sonic Youth birthed Daydream Nation are largely lost to history. It was their last New York album, their ode to a city decaying in a blind heat. Lee Ranaldo says in the liner notes of this deluxe re-release that “the bands we were into [at the time] were all American and they really sounded that way.” After the Daydream Japanese tour, openers Boredoms turned the band on to a more global noise scene, but it’s the summer of 1988, and the members of Sonic Youth, mired in the hot city, have yet to quit their day jobs.
With dogged staying power, SY has failed to fade from relevance over most of its 25 odd years. Their long meandering criss-cross through the Sonic pastures they staked (somewhere between noise and pop) from their earliest allegiance to Glenn Branca have sometimes been coded as two separate Youths, the SYR releases during the 90s typifying their experimental penchant for noise while releases like Murray Street and Rather Ripped have been tailored to their tight-fitting populist Cool. Indeed, last year’s Rather Ripped was a pleasant laurel-resting point for the band, perhaps its most cohesively pop-structured conglomeration to date. Reissues have also taken a significant position in SY’s ongoing release parade, The Destroyed Room B-Sides and rarities collection most recently dusting the attic of their junk, worth its weight in gold to the faithful. Likewise, the reissues of the sludgy romp through their grungy early 90s sound, 1990’s Goo and 1992’s Dirty , were repackaged in 2005 and 2004 respectively.
All this fanfare was a sort of royal procession trumpeting the emperor’s arrival for a new generation of fans who, adequately warned, ought to be prepared for the bands finest self-summation. The Daydream Nation deluxe edition comes timed with the summer’s globe-spanning live performances of the album, which ought to secure the collection’s pedestal in the pantheon of rock, if not popular music at large. More importantly than its consideration as a track list, Sonic Youth positions the songs within Daydream Nation as a body of art transcendent of the package in which it was initially bought and sold.
So the band will coax a grander legacy and we will fawn over their entreaties. But back to 1988. The oft-ignored lyrical content of Daydream gives a hint of their minds at the time. Their obsession with the here and now, mixed with the apocalyptic vision of urban decay, formed a kind of lyrical bedrock of energy and aggression and simultaneously, paralysis. Ranaldo and Thurston Moore’s vocals reflect the passivity in this posturing, their antipathetic delivery and limited vocal ranges venting “why try” , where Gordon is at her most hot and bothered: “I’m trying for the future / it’s funny that way / I wanna know!” Ranaldo’s sentiments on “Eric’s Trip” (”Hatred / I hate the past”) and later, “Hey Joni” (”Forget the future, these times are such a mess / Tune out the past and just say yes”) and Moore’s on “Candle” (”I can’t wait / I can’t stay, a candle / Gotta change my mind before it burns out”) teeter on the precipice between an ecstatic peace in the present and an inexorable pressure to create something meaningful before it’s too late and the rioting candle of youth is burned on both ends. Later on in “Rain King”, Ranaldo again utters a dread fear for his worth: “It feels like years and all I’ve done is fought / And not turned up, anything”.
Moore goes farthest in detailing the city around which Daydream grew. On the city streets: “See flashing eyes / They’re flashing ‘cross to me / Burnin’ up the sky /Sunshining into me / Your locust crown / Cop-killin’ heartbeat / Head’s lookin’ down / Bowin’ out, to the street.” And he’s obliquely political about the epidemic: “It’s a guilty man / That increased the crack / It’s total trash / Sack ‘em on the back / With a heavy rock.” But the most vivid portrayal of the daily joy and fear of the city comes out in his classic wander from his Lower East Side home:
Falling out of sleep, I hit the floor
Put on some rock tee and I’m out with the door
From Bowery to Broome to Greene, I’m a walking lizard
Last night’s dream was a talking baby lizard
All comin’ from hu-man imagination
Day dreaming days in a daydream nation
Smashed-up against a car at three A.M.
Kids just up for basketball, beat me in my head
There’s bum trash in my hall and my place is ripped
I’ve totaled another amp, I’m calling in sick
It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation
Day dreaming days in a daydream nation
While Daydream’s preceding album Sister was well into the band’s long warm journey into accessibility, (a concept that was only a glimmer in EVOL’s messy, blood-shot eye), Daydream went a step further in synthesizing that once novel divide between noise and pop. It was in some ways more of a conceptual step than a cleanly executed mission. As Lee Ranaldo puts it in the liner notes, “while it has its own sophistication on a structural level, the playing is pretty crude.”
Because of the fluidity between Sonic Youth’s songwriting process and its live-performed product, the band’s live tracks shed light on the songs’ ongoing fluidity within the set structures established on the album and their ability to slip quickly back into full-on noise. There’s the weird Lou Reed-inflected Kim Gordon vocals, sped up and hiked up an octave on “Eric’s Store.” Or the de-chorused heavy distortion guitar intro on “‘Cross The Breeze” that sounds as if it’s got an extra detuned string included for half-step dissonance. “Eric’s Trip” displays a violent immediacy and aggressive atonality that couldn’t exist in the safe isolation of a studio. These differences are pretty frequent, reassuring those among us who value the authenticity of freedom in noise that for Sonic Youth, experimentation was not simply a pre-manufactured smoke-screen of practiced guitar tricks, nor an aural conceit carefully crafted to appear more wild than it was. Most every live track informs this freedom with interludes and preludes that manipulate the fabric of what we’ve grown so comfortable knowing in the 19 years since the songs were first branded into the indie landscape. As always with live collections, there are tracks that fail to carry weight or interest against the studio original. This is the case with the frail version of “The Wonder” recorded at CBGB’s in 1988. Still, Moore’s mafioso snarl “this city is a wonduh towuhn” allows a little warmth into the generally stone-cold body of work.
SY has reissued its masterpiece. Will they continue to play the media game, timing release and performances for maximum exposure, reminding us of their relevance in regular installments, all while releasing safely gorgeous and introspective albums? The 2006 distribution deal Moore struck with Universal Records for Ecstatic Peace, his own label (one as old as Sonic Youth), signs bands in the image of those who inspired him as a young man as well as those that take after him. Also, the resurfacing of Bark Haze as one of Moore’s curated bands at ATP is another harkening back to his formative years. His increasing attention to the past might disappoint those hard-line fans who await a new wave of innovation from their idols, but those stubbornly watching the horizon will miss the miles of empty space left to develop and exploit by the band that first claimed such wide boundaries of experimental rock.

[hirsute_biped]

so, was the talking baby lizzard a psychic promonition of contemporary gieco insurance ads? is geico secretly sponsoring thier new tour? revisionary product placement? secret daydream island lizzard inhabitants?

[atsonicpark]

i thought it was a talking baby wizard.

..oh well, their lyrics suck.

[Miss Pornstar]

Originally Posted by Moshe

http://www.imposemagazine.com/mag/?p=985

By Jeremy Krinsley
And he’s obliquely political about the epidemic: “It’s a guilty man / That increased the crack / It’s total trash / Sack ‘em on the back / With a heavy rock.”.

Has he taken that off the 33 1/3 book? Thurston already pointed out the misheard lyrics...

[Moshe]

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/images...big-dusted.gif


Love it or hate it, Daydream Nation is a classic. Top 100 accolades from Spin, Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, and NME back up that claim from the media angle; less scientifically, I can’t count how many Sonic Youth fans, staunch or casual, that I’ve talked to who rate it especially highly. The record signaled Sonic Youth’s transition from underground icons to mainstream interlopers, a change that came with some controversy. At the time that it was released, it was greeted by grousing as well as praise; they’d left SST, they’d wimped out, Bob Loblaw. Daydream Nation’s success made it possible for Sonic Youth to sign to Geffen, which has in turn given them the platform to engage popular culture at the same time that they’ve championed hard core, noise, free improv, and diverse other subcultural manifestations.

Sonic Youth has been super-sizing their back catalog with two CD/four LP deluxe versions for a few years now, so it was inevitable that they’d get around to giving Daydream Nation that treatment. But they’re observing this one differently; instead of simply dropping a few of its songs into their live set, they’re playing the whole thing at festival gigs in Europe and the USA this summer. That seems significant given the band’s historic determination to move ahead on their own terms, and even more so when you look at their recent history. Their last couple records have stripped off the avant-garde trim; Sonic Nurse, Jim O’Rourke’s final effort with the band, was given over to his elaborate pop machinations, and Rather Ripped, the first without him, is a stripped-back “we did it in our basement” effort that sounds like a distillation of the tuneful rockouts that expanded their audience in the early Geffen years. For a band that’s spent so much time pushing rock’s envelope, it seems pretty regressive to openly cater to nostalgia by capping a back-to-our-basics move with a tour devoted to a 19-year-old career landmark, even though the people will surely love it; Sonic Youth’s shows in London sold out before the promoters spent a single cent on advertising.

This deluxe edition has plenty of extras to lure confirmed fans into buying it again; there’s a demo version of “Eric’s Trip,” some contemporary contributions to tribute albums, and live versions of every song that, until now, have gone mostly unheard. The re-mastering job is nice, of course, yielding details without revising the sound. The live stuff is mostly noisier, faster, and occasionally a bit sloppier than the original versions, but not so drastically different that they’ll change anyone’s mind about anything. The geek-fest aspects carry over to the booklet. There are plenty of previously undistributed pictures, including a reproduction of a Russian bootleg cover with Cyrillic script and a photo of a candle instead of Gerhard Richter’s painted portrait of one. Of course, there is also loads of annotation, including the obligatory historical essay by best band buddy Byron Coley, full of reminiscence about the good-old/bad-old days when SY stepped around crackheads as they walked to the studio. Coley unintentionally pinpoints one factor that contributed to the record’s success: While it may, as he indicates, have been largely drug-themed, no one could tell for sure what it was really about. The songs, while hard to decipher, do not have any of that stuff about running with the Manson family that might have scared people away from previous efforts.

But if the lyrics are opaque, the music is quite clear. With Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth managed to make their Monkees record and their Grateful Dead record at the same time. Every tune has hooks, sharp ones un-dulled by the extended jams that repeatedly stretch past the seven-minute mark. Like its predecessors, it rewards repeat listening with layers of meaning and sound, but it also has immense surface appeal. Play Daydream Nation twice and you’ll have a memory of every song, which isn’t something you could say about every Sonic Youth record – or every double LP by any band. Further enhancing accessibility, their trademarked exotic guitar tunings were prettier than on prior records, and the noisy bits were contained, even composed – listen to the washes of sound that wind down “The Sprawl,” so inevitable that they sound orchestrated. But the band did all this without sacrificing their ability to hit it hard; “Eric’s Trip,” “Silver Rocket,” and “Eliminator Jr.” are all slamming and succinct, and “`Cross The Breeze” manages to combine the intricacy of prog with runaway train velocity. All the extras function like a better frame and new lighting; the portrait’s still the same, you just look at it a little bit differently. As for what it means that the band is taking it back onstage, only time will tell if this is the year that Sonic Youth joined the ranks of the Box Tops, the Shadows of Night, Steely Dan, and all those other bands that play their hits each summer at sheds or state fairs.

By Bill Meyer

[Moshe]

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmu...113796,00.html

Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

 

(Universal)

Michael Hann
Friday June 29, 2007
The Guardian

 

 

Buy Daydream Nation now

When the US rock underground began poking its head above the surface in 1988 with the release of Daydream Nation, a process was set in train that would lead to Nirvana becoming the biggest rock band in the world. Sonic Youth had been putting out records of varying degrees of listenability for several years, but Daydream Nation, a sprawling double album, saw them harnessing their strange guitar tunings and freeform leanings to tighter song structures and melodies, with startling results. Nearly 20 years on, Daydream Nation sounds almost flawless, from wistful opener Teen Age Riot ("It's getting kinda quiet in my city head/ It takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed right now") through to its proggy closer, Trilogy. This new edition contains that rarest of beasts: a bonus disc of live versions that enhances rather than dilutes the power of the core material, and reveals a band of rare power and control.