July 21, 2007

Sonic Youth rockets back to 'Daydream Nation'
Review: The band's revival of its 1988 masterpiece at the Greek reminds how groundbreaking it remains.
By BEN WENER
The Orange County Register

In 1988, the year after I graduated high school, three albums forever changed the way I heard music. In the order in which they were released: Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” (April), Metallica’s “… And Justice for All” (August) and, most importantly, Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” (October).

Three radical, cacophonous, rather long stunners spaced just six months apart, the last of which was performed by its authors in its entirety Friday night before a full house at the Greek Theatre.

Each startled in different ways. Public Enemy’s revolutionary call – that was a terrifyingly enraged yet magnetic jolt of black reality rivaled only by N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton,” its unnerving, oft-imitated production dissonance expressing fury born from decades of inequality. The second was like no metal I had ever heard – which, at that point, included 1986’s “Master of Puppets,” the epicenter of the Metallica quake. It took the ominous shredding of “… And Justice for All” to get through to me. A raw, feral work of double-LP length that, like “Daydream Nation,” was issued as a single CD (wow! what will they think of next?!), it announced itself as a gigantic opus demanding listeners get lost inside its dark passages for days on end.

But the waves of feedback fuzz that carried “Daydream Nation” along – that really sounded like nothing else. The other two titles, they had immediate antecedents any rock kid of standard education could recognize: Public Enemy traded in then-exploding rap, Metallica worked with, uh, metal. What, however, was Sonic Youth? And from where, I wondered at the time, did its torrential approach originate?

Eventually I would connect the dots – to the Velvet Underground, to the Stooges, to Television and Wire, to composer Glenn Branca, to the anarchic spirit of punk. Just entering Cal State Fullerton, though, I knew only from mid-’80s college-rock, the sort I sought out while seemingly everyone else at Canyon High listened to Van Hagar’s “5150” and the “Top Gun” soundtrack. We all got into U2, of course, and I rarely came across someone who didn’t want to go to an Oingo Boingo Halloween show. But for us adventurous types there was another world to discover – the true alternative rock, the music of the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets and the Birthday Party and early R.E.M. and the pre-“I’ll Be You” Replacements and the Jesus and Mary Chain and … really, it’s quite a long list.

Anyone immersed in such sounds at the time could recognize that Sonic Youth shared a certain sensibility with most of those names – like them, the New York art-punk noise-control masters unflinchingly struck out on their own musically, adhering to few if any of rock’s conventions at a time when it seemed like most of them had decayed for good. The crucial difference between SY and everyone else, however, has always been about innate daring – that need to repeatedly reinvent the wheel, obliterate boundaries, explore the psyche’s abyss through both oblique lyrics and norm-crushing sound forge.

I’d leave the Minutemen out of this comparison – there never was and likely never will be another band like that trio – but for all the incredible, influential music the aforementioned acts delivered to an Alternative Nation then filled with relative toddlers, Sonic Youth had more daring than all of them combined.

They were not alone in ’88, mind you – shortly following “Daydream Nation” into mom-and-pop record shops was the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” My Bloody Valentine’s “Isn’t Anything” and Mudhoney’s “Superfuzz Bigmuff.” Those were all debuts, however. “Daydream Nation,” a critical (if not commercial) breakthrough on the order of R.E.M.’s “Document,” came fairly deep into the band’s catalog.

And just as “Document” felt in some ways like a powerful rephrasing of the albums that preceded it, so did “Daydream Nation” reshape and further the advances put forth by 1986’s “EVOL” and the following year’s “Sister.” It fulfilled those works’ grander ambition while serving as opening salvo in the next (read: major-label) phase of Sonic Youth’s career.

From this vantage point it sure stands now like the death knell of genuine indie-rock, the last great gasp before the majors got wise to its salability and started signing fifth-rate clones along with pioneers while plundering scenes in various cities. What better time to revive “Daydream Nation,” then – when much of even the best indie-rock has had its vitality slightly tarnished by critical hype machinery and relentless cooler-than-thou attitude. Sometimes it takes a stunt, so to speak, on the level of doing “Daydream” from start to finish to remind today’s indie artiste just how conventional and career-driven he really is.

Frankly, the freshness of “Daydream” is simply astonishing; Friday night it sounded as though it had just been released days earlier. Leave timelessness for the Beatles and the Stones – with Sonic Youth’s masterpiece it’s more a case of it being completely beyond time, disconnected from any era. It was ahead of the curve in ’88, and it’s still more cutting-edge than most anything released these days.

It remains a daunting listening experience, however. If you don’t succumb to its surges, its ebb and flow, its abrasive, sometimes atonal hypnotic drone – if you don’t gaze into the flame of its cover candle, hugely emblazoned behind the band at the Greek, until you begin to go blind – then it may lock you out permanently.

Despite opening with perhaps SY’s single greatest song – the seven-minute, Velvets-infused charge of “Teen Age Riot” – then blitzing onward into the gathering storm of “Silver Rocket,” it is one of the group’s least inviting records. Its robustness is accumulated as its fret-grinding journey floats forward, past some of the most incisive cuts from bassist Kim Gordon (“The Sprawl,” “’Cross the Breeze”) and guitarist Lee Ranaldo (“Eric’s Trip,” “Hey Joni”), past the space-age radio interference of “Providence” and the roiling rumble of Thurston Moore’s “Rain King,” and ultimately culminating in the cataclysm of the closing “Trilogy,” the second part of which (“Hyperstation”) finds Gordon moaning like an orgasmic Yoko Ono.

Sonic Youth, in one of the mightiest performances I’ve seen the band give, roared through it all as if it were one long piece that should never be chopped up for parts. They returned after its conclusion with equal power placed upon material from its recent album “Rather Ripped,” all of which came across far more dramatically than it did last year as warm-up for Pearl Jam. But as with Roger Waters and his return to “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the success of a live “Daydream Nation” – resuscitated by a masterful band that now stands among the longest running ever with original lineup intact, regardless of genre – suggests that the welcome trend of presenting full albums on stage can, in the right hands, become something much more than nostalgia.

Indeed, Sonic Youth has raised the bar in this regard. To top itself, I now challenge the group to follow Lucinda Williams’ lead and tackle five albums in five nights at El Rey, as she will do in September. My recommendations, should they accept the assignment, and assuming there will be no replay of “Daydream”: “Sister,” “Goo,” “Dirty,” “A Thousand Leaves” and “Murray Street.”

Redd Kross, the wonderful punk-turned-power-pop outfit from L.A., also got into the night’s album-revival theme, dusting off its 1982 debut “Born Innocent.” “Still timeless,” Moore said during SY’s encore, and while that might be overstating things a bit, the collection does hold up quite well, especially given the years of melodic deepening and riff-mongering founding brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald and disconcertingly lanky guitarist Robert Hecker have put in. Paying homage to Linda Blair and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker while mixing in ripping remakes of tunes by the Carrie Nations and the serial-killer songsmith himself, Charles Manson, Redd Kross’ return to basics reminded that the best punk tends to age remarkably well.

Guys, might I suggest you next re-learn all of “Neurotica” and “Third Eye”?