Daydream Nation Music Cd

Youth Sonic - Daydream Nation

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Daydream Nation      Artist : Sonic Youth      List Price : $9.98 USD        Your Price : $7.97 USD      ProductGroup: Music      Release Date : 1993-11-23      Studio : Geffen Records      Label : Geffen Records      Avg. Customer Rating : (152 reviews)

Reviews Customer Reviews for Daydream Nation      A Classic      Rating:      A beautiful breed of melody and dissonance. Give it a few listens before casting judgment: their note patterns are anything but traditional, and one must forget the usual Western constructs of music theory before appreciating the brilliance of this album. My favorite tracks are Silver Rocket, The Sprawl, Cross the Breeze, Candle, and Kissability. I am a huge Sonic Youth fan, and this is my favorite. If you're new to SY, a good album to try afterward is Sonic Nurse or Goo. Once you appreciate their sound-- the discordance as well as the beauty-- you can get into their earlier gems such as EVOL or Sister.     Customer Reviews for Daydream Nation Cd      Sonic Youth's raison d'être      Rating:      This is it, as far as I'm concerned; the ultimate justification for the existence of Sonic Youth as a band. I was mildly precocious as an Irish teenager because I was buying import copies of 'Sister' and 'Confusion Is Sex' when my peers were digging the rad new sounds of U2's 'The Joshua Tree'. I remember going to see REM in Dublin in 1989, when they were just about to become absolutely huge, and the pre-show music was this album, which I already owned. I wore a Sonic Youth t-shirt to that gig. It didn't survive the amount of sweat I generated that night. Yes, part of me was being a pretentious git. Truth be told, I was at least as baffled by Sonic Youth as I was entranced. I honestly loved songs like 'Making the Nature Scene' and 'Schizophrenia' and 'Pipeline/Kill Time', but then there would be half an album's worth of stuff that I couldn't figure out at all. Then, bless them, they made 'Daydream Nation'. A few years after this album came out, I would go to parties as an unenthusiastic cub journalist and overhear conversations in which older journalists would have perfectly serious discussions (really!) about how Nirvana's 'Nevermind' was 'the defining album of our generation'. The hell with all that, I thought; I knew that there were two recordings that spoke to and for me as somebody who came of age around the time the Berlin wall came down. One of them was Dinosaur Jr's 'Freak Scene'. The other one was 'Daydream Nation'. For me, this is like the White Album and Sgt Pepper combined - not so much a rock album as a huge, sprawling environment, a city unto itself, which I can only take in a bit at a time. There's the gorgeous, high-energy nostalgia of 'Teenage Riot'; the mysterious 'Providence'; the scary 'Hey Joni'; the fabulous trash of 'Silver Rocket' and 'Eliminator Jr'; the enigmatic call to arms of 'Cross The Breeze'...I could go on. And on. And on. Most importantly to me, there's Lee Ranaldo's stunning finest four minutes ever, 'Eric's Trip', one of the most dizzying marriages of songwriting craftsmanship, toneless half-singing and guitar mayhem ever recorded. 'Daydream Nation' was so good that it actually killed Sonic Youth for me. I never bought another album by them again until years later, when I got 'Experimental Jet Set' on the strength of its dreamy and menacing non-hit, 'Bull in the Heather'. Hardly the behaviour of a true fan, I admit it. They finally played Dublin, at midnight in the scuzzy Olympia Theatre, some years ago. I was there. They rocked, but I was in my late twenties by then and I was just boggling at all the teenagers for whom this was clearly one of their bands. I stood there drinking beer out of a plastic cup and marvelling that Ireland had become a place where Sonic Youth might actually play a gig. Too late for me, though. This is still one of the great American rock albums. It's certainly in my top ten. Editorial Reviews for Daydream Nation Audio Cd      Amazon.com essential recording      The essential New York rock band of the post-punk era, Sonic Youth care as much about the quasi-symphonic, microtonal art-guitar music of composers like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca as they do about the rock-song form, and with Daydream Nation, they struck their greatest balance between the two. The songs hover gorgeously for extended lengths, letting guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo intertwine fragile tonalities as carefully as it's possible to do at wall-shaking volume, while Moore and bassist Kim Gordon's untutored voices disaffectedly intone words that flirt with pop stupidity, high-art eloquence, and urban cool. When they bear down and rock, they do it with a blurry intensity that finds gorgeousness at the heart of discord. --Douglas Wolk