Sonic Youth

Daydream Nation [Deluxe Edition]

(Geffen)

Record Review by Joe Cortez

What more can be said of Daydream Nation? Sonic Youth's seminal rock statement of angst, anger and anarchy continues to be as relevant a work today as it was when first released in 1988. Although not an instant commercial success, its status as a lauded underground album helped SY garner mainstream ink and attention and was a harbinger of the coming punk radio revolution to come in the form of grunge and alternative rock. But what is it about the album itself that so spurred an entire generation to take arm and make noise and continues to fascinate new fans and old?

At the risk of offending the most devoted of Sonic Youth fans, I will say that Daydream Nation is not my favorite of their canon and yet I find it a far more compelling listen than any other, including my personal pick, Goo. Perhaps it's because the album itself seems more like a bold statement than a mere collection songs, a rallying call to an America under conservative rule, mired in and inundated by soulless video images of wannabe rockers and poseur pop stars. Although the songs themselves, when taken out of context, seem weaker than the strongest material on later work, when taken as a whole, which precisely as this album should be considered, the collection becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth's definitive work, an album that crystallizes at one moment all that the band had been and would become.

With a title more poetic than punk in nature, the album begins with a dreamlike intro to their most brazen opener ever, "Teenage Riot." "You're it," breathes Kim Gordon into the ear of the listener, "Spirit Desire, Spirit Desire/ We will fall." Her layered vocals lull us into a hypnotic state of slumber before we are thrust into the throes of ear-splitting bombast and realize we are once again in the hands of a rock and roll band.

For all its noise laden wizardry, Daydream Nation has within it some of Sonic Youth's most revealing musical expressions ever. Consider the sheer audacity and experimentalism of "Providence," with its distant piano chords and CB radio communique. For all its eccentricities, the track can also be seen as a relative of sorts to Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky." And of course, who can forget the album's closer, "Trilogy," the band's outright rock opera in the guise of long form punk jam.

Like all great albums, the sonic quality of the music captured on disc is aided by great vision. The album's cover is as simple as it is iconic, becoming as identifiable as Storm Thorgerson's work on Dark Side of the Moon" Daydream's cover was designed and painted by famed German artist Gerhard Richter some five years earlier as an original piece not initially intended for rock glorification but easily adaptable as such just the same. It's interesting to note that Richter's process for producing his work was to take original photographs and reproduce the image in great detail on canvas through traditional painterly methods creating what is ostensibly a copy of a representation of reality, life. The philosophical implications of such a choice of cover could be discussed and debated endlessly, but perhaps its impact as an image lays in its symbolic simplicity as a requiem for a dying age and the hope of a new.

The re-release of the album is a lavish affair replete with the requisite additional material that fans have come to expect from Universal's past remasters of the Youth's major label debuts Goo and Dirty. This time 'round, the package includes much of the album performed live, although not in sequence - recorded over various dates and venues along with assorted demos and out-takes. The tracks are a vital document of a great band at the height of their musical prowess and clarity. Beyond the supplemental, the most important aspect of this reissue is the improved aural quality of the album itself. Long overdue an upgrade, Daydream Nation has never sounded better than it does on this deluxe edition. Gone is the shrill, compressed nature of past releases in favor of a more dense, warmer soundscape.

Nearly twenty years after its release, Daydream Nation stands as Sonic Youth's lasting imprint on the contemporary musical landscape. It was the quiet beginning of a looming storm that would reset the cultural counter and, for a time, put the focus back on music.