Daydream Nation

About

In 1988, <i>Billboard</i> magazine started a new chart called Modern Rock Track. Most of the names were familiar, or at least getting there: U2, R.E.M., Sinéad O’Connor, Depeche Mode. At some point, Sonic Youth’s blistering “Teen Age Riot” showed up. It didn’t chart higher than No. 20, but it’s still weird to think of the band in the company of such mega-acts as U2 and R.E.M. By some metric, landing on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart was about as big as Sonic Youth ever got. Still, even if Sonic Youth never achieved the arena-filling heights of some of its alt-rock peer, <i>Daydream Nation</i> is an album that transformed everyone who heard it. The band had been getting progressively more accessible since 1986’s <i>Evol</i>, but <i>Daydream Nation</i> represented something different: The sound is clearer than previous effort, and the songs make more sense. Even when the band members are digressing or jamming out, there’s a shape and discipline throughout <i>Daydream Nation</i>—so much so, some tracks feel more like classic rock than free noise (“’Cross the Breeze,” “Total Trash”). The band members prove they could sound brief and nasty (“Silver Rocket”) while also beautiful and abstract, with feedback-heavy guitars that open up like oceans (“The Sprawl”). Mostly, <i>Daydream Nation</i> feels like an experiment: What if a band that had always seemed totally committed to resisting conventions decided, for once, to embrace them instead? Not that this is a highly polished album: The tunings are weird, the songs are still noisy, and it’s not like Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore had decided to learn to sing. But to the extent that rock ’n’ roll was loud, beat-heavy music that captured the passionate rebellion of youth, <i>Daydream Nation</i> was pulling a lot more weight than Depeche Mode (all due respect). And making this a double album wasn’t just Sonic Youth’s way of poking fun of 1970s excess; the band members really <i>did</i> have a lot to say, even if they could come off as circuitous and detached while saying it. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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