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Sorry, it's not specifically referred to the Deluxe edition. That's a review I read 20 months ago. Hope that it could fit anyway.
Dave Everley
Q Classic
Volume 1 Issue 10
Daydream Nation
Boundary-obliterating career high from art-punk brainboxes
If the history of American alternative music has its own collective Zelig figure, then Sonic Youth is it. From the messy birth of punk rock in the cradle of CBGB's (which they witnessed as impressionable fans), through the noisy, chaotic adolescence of the No Wave and hardcore punk movements (both of which they were associated with, though inaccurately in the latter case), and on to grunge (which they inadvertently nurtured via their patronage of Nirvana), they have been a perpetual presence - sometimes in the background, sometimes stepping out of the shadows to blaze a trail that others can't help follow.
Never was the latter more evident than on 1988's Daydream Nation. If their first four albums ('83's Confusion Is Sex, '85's Bad Moon Rising, '86's EVOL and '87's masterful Sister) progressed from wilfully demanding experimentalism to a significantly more approachable, though no less challenging, melding of rock'n'roll and avant garde music, Daydream Nation was their biggest step yet. Previously, Sonic Youth had vacillated between music and art; here, they erased that boundary and drew a whole new one.
Ironically, given their received status as godfathers to Seattle's great unwashed - a mantle they were never wholly comfortable with - Daydream Nation is no grunge album. Rather it's a limitless landscape of sound whose ever-shifting topography takes in discordant highs and pacific lows, often in the same musical passages.
This duality permeates Daydream Nation's sprawling 71-minute length. Opener and early college radio hit Teenage Riot - by far the album's most straightforward track - is an ironically lackadaisical call-to-arms that presaged Kurt Cobain's own knowingly disaffected slacker anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit by three years. Conversely, Providence's delicate piano, crackling static and disembodied voice is as dreamlike as the burning candle on the album's artwork (a detail from German abstract artist Gerhard Richter's 1983 painting Kerze).
For all their lofty pretensions, Sonic Youth always had the capacity to rock out. Silver Rocket is a snarling, punk-inflected workout propelled by singer/guitarist Thurston Moore's boyishly bratty snarl. Elsewhere, fitting titled three-part closer Trilogy careens wildly between relentless guitar motorik and disharmonic freakouts. The whole album is a nutshell, in other words.
Visionary as it is, thoug, Daydream Nation's musical influence on grunge is debatable - its arty tendencies and (albeit disguised) intellectualism ran counter to the latter's more primal urges. But there's no doubting the fact that its creators' unwillingness to conform helped shape the fiercely independent attitude of such first-generation grunge acts such as Soundgarden and Mudhoney.
After Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth left indie purists aghast when they signed to a major label, Geffen, home of Guns N' Roses. Typically, their contract stipulated that the band retained artistic control over their material; more pertinently, Thurston Moore took the opportunity to introduce his new paymasters to a relatively unknown band named Nirvana.
"We are influential in showing people that you can make any kind of music you want", said Kim Gordon. This unconventional masterpiece remains the ultimate confirmation of that statement.
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