Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
October 18th, 1988.
‘Daydream Nation’ would be the bands sixth studio album, first double album, and final effort for an indie label. This is where Sonic Youth became the ultimate version of their potential; where the daydreaming daze met the daydream nation.
Daydream Nation is a seismic affair of guitar tones, assortments, and applications of the instrument - chords and melodies prove, yet again, to not be enough to satisfy the Sonic Youth quartet. Extended cuts would be the name of the game - take previous experiments with soundscapes and disfigured feats and spread them out across vast expanses of sprawling space.
Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore combat one another with intricately thought out - although ultimately once in a lifetime, freestyle-like - guitar routines. Like dancers prancing around the stage within one anothers whirlwind of motion - at times violently pulled apart - they come together to fulfill a sense of unity. Repeated listens prove no use in figuring things out. Things occur when they decide to - sporadically placed pieces embellish the material when they feel the need. There's no blueprint for this kind of thing. It's of the moment. Keep in mind that none if this works as well without Kim Gordon and Steve Shelley providing the foundations for it to flourish.
Dreams of a blistering pace. They play behind your eyelids as you go through your day-to-day. Reel-to-reel replays. Neverending and vicious - uncaring. Not necessarily nightmares, but close enough. Music blown out beyond the beyond, reeled back in to package it in a relatively listenable way, all the while remaining at complete odds with the norm. The conscious requires a subconscious, if you will.
A world unto itself. The guitar record to end all guitar records.
Jackknife inside of a dream.
