I agree Daydream Nation only makes it by the skin of its teeth into a countdown of psychedelic albums. No one, not even Jim DeRogatis, seems to see Sonic Youth that way. Wikipedia as usual flails with the shotgun approach: noise rock, alternative rock, avant-rock, indie rock, art punk, postpunk (each term with an article defining it). Fair enough! I’ll opt for postpunk for the sake of convention, but don’t miss the extreme, mind-bending counterpoints of this album. That’s what makes it psychedelic for me. The music is churning and raw—may take some getting used to—but the cover, the painting Candle (Kerze) by the German painter Gerhard Richter, is suitable for propping up against the wall for meditation sessions when you’re out of candles. It’s one of the most peaceful album covers I’ve ever seen and it is what drew me to it in the first place (after giving up on the band circa 1985). The title offers another arching spectrum, suggesting on the one hand the qualities of the strange tunings, the electric guitar acoustics studies, and the distanced furies in “Daydream,” but even more importantly suggesting, in “Nation,” the oceanic currents in which this band willfully loses itself. But this is an odd kind of postpunk ocean, perhaps more like a vast and unexpected inland sea. Daydream Nation works best for me—works extremely well—in limited, regular doses. The double-LP vinyl release was how I knew it and I generally took it one side at a time. I wouldn’t want to call them suites. This is not Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes, which never worked for me let alone as oceanic. Yet in a way that is how Daydream Nation operates. These little sets and blasts of electric guitars to the brain alternate vocalists / lyricists among Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo (who sounds so much like Moore in a slightly different register that I didn’t notice for years, sort of like Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins). I took the album one side at a time. Or on the headphones for walking, picking it up and putting it down most days. The CD generally proved too long for me to go all at one gulp, even with shuffle—it tends to fight too much with other albums, for one thing. Lately I have listened to it on repeat, 30 to 50 minutes at a time, picking up where I left off, and that works well too. Like the candle on the cover that burns with steady flame, there is something very still at the center of Daydream Nation—within the lengthier tracks themselves (“Teen Age Riot,” 6:57; “’Cross the Breeze,” 7:00; “Total Trash,” 7:33) or in the album taken as a whole with some of its shorter pieces. Though I loved all the sides it was side 3 that called to me most often and still does, with nothing longer than 5:00. The two Ranaldo songs (all music on all tracks credited to the band collectively), “Hey Joni” and “Rain King,” are showcases for the way the band itself can feel like it has turned into a lurching monster rearing up across a cityscape, destroying buildings. Thurston Moore’s “Candle” bids to be the soul of the album. The 2:41 “Providence” is a montage of random low-fi piano tinkling, an amplifier humming, and answering machine messages from Mike Watt, which altogether suggest, among other things, that drugs were involved with the making of this album. Really, the whole thing, you know I have to say it: PLAY LOUD.
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