7. Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (1988)

[2007 review here]

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.

Sister (1987)

Sister was long the null Sonic Youth album in my experience—the proclaimed favorite of many SY fans even today, but the one that never particularly seemed worth second listens whenever I tried it again. So this will have to be something of a mea culpa and I’ll make it quick. Maybe it was lost on me in the backward-casting incandescent glow of Daydream Nation, which brought me back to the band after writing them off years earlier as hopelessly enamored of pigfuck noise, in-your-face attitude, and little more (maybe now I have to revisit Confusion Is Sex and Bad Moon Rising again after all this time?). Plus, honestly, I don’t know how you call anything else but Daydream Nation their best. I was charmed by the loopy experimentalism of EVOL and even The Whitey Album but nothing about Sister ever particularly stuck. So I sat down with it recently for a few weeks and played it a lot and finally must agree it’s a good one. The song titles alone are remarkably evocative, these clipped and cryptic two-word constructions: “Catholic Block,” “Cotton Crown,” “Tuff Gnarl,” “White Cross” (which seems to be about low-grade speed). At one point, I couldn’t seem to get enough of the admittedly rapey “Pacific Coast Highway,” which comes roaring in like a pack of clowns in a jeep playing banjos. It’s comical and it’s menacing and it’s introspective and then it pummels on a return, with Kim Gordon playing the role of the Green River Killer (as I imagined it, suitable for the timeframe) making the pitch to “come on get in the car, let’s go for a ride somewhere.” Maybe a virtue for Sister lovers is the relative brevity of these tracks, which barely break five minutes if that, as compared to the oceanic workups of the double-LP Daydream Nation. Sister might also be the album where the attack of the strange tunings is most thoughtfully honed. From the opening “Schizophrenic” on they are in high form, moody, wounding, always slightly wrong, and feeling unique from track to track. They sound strange but you’re not always sure why. The more I hear Sister the more I realize how little it sounds like anything else except themselves in an unusually purified mode. Well, “Hot Wire My Heart” seems to preen with its influences, sounding like “Sister Ray” in the verses—is it an elliptical source of this album’s title?—and “Sweet Sweet Heart” (or something by the Vibrators from Pure Mania). It works great. The whole album is good. Don’t miss it if you can.

Sonic Youth, "Titanium Expose" (1990)

(listen)

After Daydream Nation thoroughly crossed my wires, "Titanium Expose" took a while to sneak up on me. I didn't care either way about the major label thing but I was never a particular partisan of its home, Goo, aside from the fact it's square in the middle of their great years. So it's good. In fact, it's very fine. But it's also when it started becoming a matter of sorting out hits and misses. Always some of both in Sonic Youth albums for many years—still, actually. For the longest time "Titanium Expose" was one of those fine points, that song near the end. In the CD era of listening to one-sided or scrambled sequencing it seemed more work always to distinguish one from another, or they could blur. Anyway, this is where I get all rock star-crossed. Swoon, high as a kite, did that just happen? See also The Year Punk Broke, opening shot. What it felt like and what it was like. That's found nearly pure in scattered passages of the 6:25 "Titanium Expose," floating up for maybe a minute altogether, when it's wound up right, when the pounding suddenly turns sublime, ecstatic, throbbing, powerful, etc. Life force, alive. At about the 3:50 mark, and the best of it lasts 20 seconds there—20 seconds good for a lifetime's faith. Here's where the breaking bread happens. All the good adjectives. I've heard it so much I have a hard time hearing it any more. It's already over and done, and I missed again (at least on a conscious level) it. But it's part of my brain or psyche now anyway. "Titanium Expose" will always have a place.

Sonic Youth, "Shadow of a Doubt" (1986)

(listen)

This fascinating sound sculpture is mysteriously focused on Alfred Hitchcock movies—named after one, with plot points from at least one more woven into the whisper-chant from Kim Gordon. In my YouTube travels I found a nice homemade video (here), made out of this song and scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It is an inspired mashup as indeed is this song itself, potent with popular culture imagery and currents. Yes, the strange tunings, it's always the strange tunings with Sonic Youth. I love them, they always sound evocative and insinuating and lovely to me. I'm convinced it's the basis more than anything else of where people fall on this band. Here it is distilled to one of its purest forms, jewel-hard and gleaming. Compare "Providence" on Daydream Nation. As musique concrete the open spaces are similar but the sense of a narrative is stronger in "Providence." In "Shadow of a Doubt" there is only the sense that a narrative might exist. Or narrative itself—the sense that narrative might exist. "I swear I didn't mean it / I swear it wasn't meant to be / Must a been a dream ... He said / 'You take me and I'll be you' / 'You kill him and I'll kill her' / Kiss me." This is a similar way of looking at things to what one finds in David Lynch movies, dreams and fragments and an idea that narrative might exist, which is probably why the video mashup works so nicely. To close the loop on this, you also find this way of looking at things in Alfred Hitchcock pictures, notably Vertigo, which doesn't so much eschew narrative as grow absent-minded about its existence, distracted by ... something. And Sonic Youth wraps it all up in a beautiful strange noise that goes down easy and lingers to effect. It's as if they knew, as I said once in another context (here). And that guy doing the mashup? Him too.

Washing Machine (1995)

Five years after selling out and signing with a major label finds Sonic Youth comfortably churning out product, and what product it is. Recorded in the run-up to the band's headlining turn on the Lollapalooza festival, this their ninth album, fourth for the aforementioned major, boasts a rock foursome, 2 guitars bass drums, in full command. The guitars crunch like dry gravel, hitting all notes and tones; the feedback shrieks and howls, skirting the edges of shrill but never crossing over, instead adding texture and authoritative emotional veracity; and the tunings bring the mysterious and ethereal more evocatively than ever. Production's pretty good too. Perhaps most surprising, the ability of the band to write memorable melody (as a unit, evidently), the kind to hum with, to remember later when you're far from it, at work or walking along or sitting in a bar with friends, is nothing short of amazing. The kind, as on "Little Trouble Girl," that pays respect to the Shangri-Las. Or that, like the title song or album opener "Becuz," just plain get the job done. I don't think writing good songs is about going soft or getting old or complacent. I think it's about getting better at what they do. Nowhere do the elements of this entirely unexpected, almost shocking growth come into focus more than on "The Diamond Sea," the 19:36 elegy to Kurt Cobain, who died the year before they entered the studio to record this album. From the first tentative seconds it looms from out of a sad, brave place, Thurston Moore's lyrics going about their work with a minimum of fuss, the vocal as boyish as it must be. Then the band lets loose, methodically tearing shreds across its surfaces, winding itself up good and tight, with Kim Gordon's bass maintaining the lyrical underpinning as the vortex opens and shuts and opens, until things are quiet again and Moore is singing again, the sad, brave song, and then all goes swirling off again, hurtling-like, massive, buoyant, floating, dignified wreckage, casting its spells deep. I've heard it compared to the Grateful Dead, and not as an insult. I don't hear that exactly. But somehow I like the comparison.

Goo (1990)

The much anticipated (and/or dreaded, depending on your point of view) major-label debut follow-up to Daydream Nation entered a worthy placeholder in the band's career. Obviously there was never going to be any corporate compromise/sellout going on here—there could not possibly be, given all that Thurston Moore & crew had at stake. Just as obviously, if only in hindsight, it was never going to be a match for the album before it. Not much could be. Disappointment, pleasure, relief—that was all in the eye of the beholder. I think it's pretty good. Spotty, maybe. But the sheets of noise are there. The melodies are still improving. The occasional jokes sharpening. It was brave enough given major-label expectations on all sides. And it still sounds pretty good. How many albums from 1990 can you say that about?

Daydream Nation (1988)

The best album that Sonic Youth ever made, one of the best albums of its time, kind of sneaked up on a lot of us—me, I know, for sure. They were an interesting sideshow, Thurston Moore with his big mouth and all that howling noise they brought and the strange tunings. Strictly small stage indie world. But then this, the bold double album with gatefold, and with that somnolent candle, carrying the kind of sounds that sink deep and somehow pack spiritual significance on the way. You can listen to this—loud, on headphones, for example, walking around the city at night—and after awhile the boundaries blur and you don't know where you end and the music begins or the dark and the sheets of noise and the pure physical sensation of it and your own breathing. They were starting to write songs, with melody even lyrics, but that's not what makes this work. That's something else, but suddenly the whole world unfolded open and the possibilities went all the way to the red horizon and beyond. Essential. That's what I'm trying to say.

EVOL (1986)

This first came into my life as vinyl and at least one side had a lock groove. I always wondered how they were going to replicate that on CD. Well, of course they couldn't. I suppose there's a way you might manage it with digital but it would probably just be annoying. It was kind of annoying anyway, but also cool. This is about where that started with Sonic Youth, operating on pure instinct and making it work. Noise is deployed liberally throughout, of course, and say hello to the tunings, but what counted for me was that overnight they had given in to an unsuspected knack for melody. In general, the proceedings here, however discordant, are far closer to gentle and allusive than thundering. I'm still trying to figure out the Hitchcock reference, wherein the plot to one Alfred Hitchcock movie (Strangers on a Train) is recounted under the title of another (Shadow of a Doubt), kind of. Those are two of Hitchcock's best, by the way, from his overlooked late '40/early '50s period. It's like they knew.