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2013, albums, miscellaneous, music, personal, thoughts

In Memoriam Sonic Youth Part V: “Daydream Nation”

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Sonic Youth - "Daydream Nation"
Sonic Youth – “Daydream Nation”

Well, this is the one. This is the album that I start everyone off with. It is their undisputed classic. Daydream Nation. Even the name, to me anyway, is enigmatic. It’s just perfect, flawless in every way. The opening, the close. There is not one bad thing to say about this album. I may be letting my bias show, but I am also the one that wears a toque with “Sonic Youth” sewed into it every day once the temperature goes below 50º.

Teen Age Riot

Anyway, I still remember getting this album on cassette. I like to tell myself (and others) that it is the first album that I ever bought. And though this story isn’t completely accurate (we all had our unfortunate phases when we were too young to know what it meant to listen to good music. Though, I have met some people that really haven’t had one of those phases. I am extremely jealous that those people didn’t have to go through an MC Hammer phase and a whatever the hell else phase. I listened to Top 40 radio a lot until I was like 10. So sue me.) but in a way it is the truth. Buying Daydream Nation was the first album that I ever bought that ever mattered. I never looked back, and I still haven’t. I can’t even imagine how many times I have listened to this album.

I still remember getting the tape and looking through the pictures and the lyrics and just staring at it. Everything was just part of a complete package. The color scheme, the mood of the pictures with their grainy, hazy focus of the band standing in (what I assume is) the Bowery near CBGB’s (totally guessing there, but just going with what I was thinking then) and the cover photo (which I didn’t know at the time was a famous painting, a painting which I have been lucky enough to see in person in Chicago. It was an amazing experience standing in front of that painting, with its meaning sort of reversed in a way that the painting now described the album to me, whereas when I first heard the album, it was, to me, describing the sound of that painting) and just everything seemed to be so focused and purposeful. I can’t be alone in thinking that the sound of Lee’s disintegrating amp throughout “Providence” is meant to sound like a burning candle, giving sound to the cover? And, of course, there is the song “Candle,” but that is too obvious.

Cross The Breeze

And how could those sounds be so purposeful? How could the howling guitars that blasted out of the middle of “Silver Rocket” possibly be directed, or purposeful? I didn’t know the word ‘aleatory’ back then, but I know that I was thinking about how they got those sounds – that sounded so random and scattered and loud and noisy and…great – to do what they wanted them to do? How was it that they were able to tame the wild feedback and static into the form of the songs?

I still wonder about these things to this day. It just seems like all of the elements were perfect when they were recording the album. All the mistakes fit perfectly into the aesthetic of the album. The interactions of the guitars, the structure of the songs, the lyrics, the focus, this was an already amazing band making a giant leap forward in their sound. Sure, like I said in previous posts, the sounds on “Sister,” and even as far back as “Bad Moon Rising,” were pointing to this, we all knew that something like this was on the way (well, I mean people at the time that were paying attention knew. I was only 7 when the album came out. I had no clue what was going on, I was home learning to do multiplication or something like that), maybe not something exactly like this, I don’t think that this is the kind of album that anyone completely expects. There is definitely going to be a certain amount of surprise at hearing something this great for the first time. I mean, I know that it caught me off guard.

In a way though, this album is sort of bittersweet. I really don’t think that they ever got any higher than this. This was their last release before they signed to DGC, and though I love some of those albums, most of those albums, I don’t think that they were ever able to keep the magic that was on “Daydream Nation.”

Candle

And that is part of the reason why this album is so special. It was a moment in time. It was something that even the band themselves could not replicate, and who knows if they even wanted to. This was Sonic Youth at the peak of their powers, and it has had an immeasurable impact upon my life to this day. I’m still trying to convince students that they want to take my class on post-tonal analysis that uses Sonic Youth’s output as the corpus that we’d analyze. There is just so much here. So many conventions that are shattered, so much individuality and energy and vision. I could go on for days about all the things that I remember when I first heard this album.

I truly hope that another album will come along that even makes me feel 1/10th as good as I felt when I first heard Daydream Nation, and I know that it will come someday, but at the same time I know that I’m going to be waiting for a long time before it happens.

 

2013, albums, miscellaneous, personal, thoughts, writing

In Memoriam Sonic Youth: Part II. “Bad Moon Rising”

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Sonic Youth - "Bad Moon Rising"
Sonic Youth – “Bad Moon Rising”

I always thought that this album was a strange way, of sorts, to follow up something like “Confusion is Sex.” But I think where that album captured the live energy of the band, this one captures them in the studio conceiving of an actual “album” album.

The fact that all of the songs blend together the way that they do is no mistake, it was a way for the band to make smoother transitions between songs when they were performed live. This was all in a bid to do away with 5 minute tuning sessions in between songs, as they didn’t have an arsenal of guitars on hand at this point in their careers, so these transitions were created to allow Lee or Thurston a few seconds to tune for the next song. The result of this is an album that is linked, obviously, harmonically and melodically as well as in timbre and mood.

I know that it sounds cheesy or stupid or whatever to foist the extramusical jargon onto an album, but I’m going to do it anyway. This album has always felt like Autumn to me. Yes, of course the cover has a lot to do with it, but there is a coldness on this album that isn’t on their debut full-length. The songs are languid, they wander (not in a bad way, by any means), the band is not afraid to have some cleaner guitar sounds. You can definitely hear them moving towards the songs on “Evol” and “Sister” a lot, especially on a track like “I Love Her All The Time,” a song that starts off innocently enough with Thurston floating out the lyrics with some percussion and bass backdrop underneath minimal guitar sounds, strings bent and echoing off into the distance. It isn’t very long before they are off and running into a wall of noise and (I assume) drumstick-wedged-under-guitar-strings type maneuvers.

But the songs here are better shaped than the ones that appear on “Confusion is Sex.” Where they came up with one idea for each of those songs, this album finds them needing to come up with significantly more material and to find interesting ways to get into and out of those ideas. I think that this is maybe the most important album for Sonic Youth as a group of people developing a writing process. It finds a nice balance between free and fixed forms.

For me, I can’t remember when it was that I first heard this album, or where I was when I was listening to it. I think that that must mean that I came to it a bit later. I do remember, however, that upon hearing it I did not immediately get into it. I didn’t immediately “get” it. I was of the mind that “there’s nothing catchy on this one” (I’m hearing myself say that in a whiny voice. I’m sure that if I said that or though that that I would say or think it in a whiny voice). I wanted the action of “Inhuman” and the noise of “Confusion is Next.” Now that I’m (significantly) older I can truly appreciate how good this album actually is.

I think that one of the reasons that I found it difficult to get into this album initially is that I couldn’t figure out which songs were which. Because they all blended together I couldn’t figure out what part that I remembered came from what song. Obviously, that is all pretty meaningless to me now. Who cares where the songs begin and end? It’s best to listen to an album all the way through anyway.

The 2nd side of the album is broken up a little bit more and has some more experimental (that’s a relative term. So when saying that something that Sonic Youth is doing is “more experimental” is saying something). “Justice is Might” slowly comes together, pulling itself up and staggering into form, the lazy guitar and vocal pulled through time by Bob Bert’s solid, uptempo drumming. That one doesn’t hang around too long, and we still have some equally spacey tracks like “Echo Canyon” and “Satan is Boring.”

The star of the show, though, is “Death Valley ’69.” In my mind it’s their first “hit.” It’s really just a classic Sonic Youth song. Thurston and Lydia Lunch (who is from my hometown) lazily sing over top of each other while the band focuses their energy on maintaining a fantastic amount of tension for extended periods before all is lost in a scratchy howl from Lunch.

Fast-forwarding to now, 2013, I started thinking about what all of this meant from an analysis perspective, what with the linking of the songs and the guitar tunings as sort of symbolizing the modulations from track to track if we are to think of the first several songs as really parts of one larger song. I started doing some initial transcriptions of the opening, and taking a post-tonal approach to it just to see what is going on, if I can. What I am finding is that it isn’t as complex as it sounds, but it’s definitely weird. Weird is good. Weird gives me something to look into, a coil to unwind. The thing is is that I have so many things that I want to look at and that I have started or half-finished that I can’t take on any more extra projects. The sketches that I have down for this album though have all the notes that I need to pick up exactly where I left off whenever I am ready and able to pick it up again.

So, in short, this album went from being something that took me a long time to get into when I was (much) younger, to something that I still listen to today and realize that there is more to it than meets the ear. The next album, though, is when things really start to get good.

2013, miscellaneous, music, personal, thoughts

In Memoriam Sonic Youth: Part I. “Confusion is Sex/Kill Yr. Idols”

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Sonic Youth - "Confusion is Next + Kill Yr. Idols"
Sonic Youth – “Confusion is Next + Kill Yr. Idols”

Sonic Youth is undoubtedly the most important band to me personally for a number of reasons. First off they were the first band that I listened to that not many other people I knew were listening to, and more importantly after hearing them I realized that a rock band can do literally whatever they wanted. Why weren’t more artists being as unique as SY? That uniqueness and individuality translated to “this band doesn’t give a fuck!” in my mind and that was a good thing. A very good thing.

I decided that since this band has been such an important part of my life, and I can say in complete honesty that I would not be where I am today if it weren’t for this band, that I would write up a post for each of their albums. Though I’m not aiming to review them (that’s been done, obviously, as some of these albums are almost 30 years old), I would rather go through them chronologically recalling how they affected me when I first heard them, or what I think about when I return to them over and over again after all these years. The posts most likely will not appear day after day in sequence, but I’ll keep the series going until it’s done.

I was still pretty young when my brother got “Confusion is Sex/Kill yr. Idols” (too young to have any money of my own). DGC was in the process of re-releasing SY’s entire back catalog and I remember there was an ad in Spin that had a list of all the albums (up to “Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star”…which will give you some idea of the timeline here) and we were dutifully trying to get all of them.

One of the things that I remember about hearing this album for the first time was that I couldn’t stop listening to it. It was so curious to me. It “sounded like shit,” was my first thought as I was still deep in the throes of a Smashing Pumpkins “Siamese Dream” obsession, with it’s meticulously clean, “perfect” guitar tone and crystal clear production. Sonic Youth, in comparison, sounded dark, mysterious, evil, scary in some ways. Walking to school listening to this album (on a Memorex that I dubbed from the CD) on my Walkman as I walked to school I remember listening to “Shaking Hell,” and the power of Kim Gordon’s voice, with the sparse emptiness of the hollow accompaniment echoing in the distance, coming off as cold, perfectly matching the brisk Fall of Western New York.

“Freezer Burn/I Wanna Be Your Dog” was a favorite, and I sure as hell didn’t know that this was a cover song, let alone who Iggy Pop was. The sheer energy and noise of “Inhuman” was the first time that I heard a song that just used noise as an instrument. Thurston’s atonal yelps sounded at once wrong and perfect. This sounded like music that anyone could do, but at the same time I knew that only Sonic Youth could. This sounded like music that I wanted to make, or at least it was music that wanted me want to make music, but I didn’t know where 90% of the sounds were coming from.

Confusion Is Next

Slack stringed weirdness at the beginning of the title track serves as uneven punctuation as the near-steady (-ish) accelerando throughout the song gets a start before another loud and squealing guitar comes crashing into the track. An entire song, on an actual album, that I was hearing for the first time, that used just cluster chords and gesture as the entire harmonic structure (though I definitely didn’t think of music in these terms when I was 13). Why do you need chords anyway? The song is tense and then to increase the tension they speed it up to a frantic pace after a section in the middle that breaks the song up a little bit. It all makes sense to me now, but then I was just in awe. I guess I still am but in a bit of a different way.

“Brother James,” listening to it now shows more the direction that the band would head in as they moved toward “Bad Moon Rising,” with verse/chorus/verse structure and guitar lines that, though off-kilter and de-tuned, are actual riffs.

Brother James

Listening back to this now I am left thinking something that has been on my mind for a long time. It’s not the elements of a song – the melodies, harmonies, structure, lyrical content etc. – that a person connects with instantly, it’s the timbre. That’s the most exciting part of listening to music, in my opinion. Think of it this way: how often in life do you get to experience something that you have never experienced before, or didn’t think was possible? How often do you get to see something that you have never seen before? Find out that something you couldn’t even conceive of actually exists? How often do you get to hear something that truly doesn’t sound – actually sound – like anything you have ever heard before?

To me, it seems that that is going to be the dividing line for people. The first thing one is confronted with when listening to music is the sound. For some it’s an impenetrable barrier, while for others it is a welcomed change from everything else that we’ve ever experienced. That element of otherness is something that continues throughout most of Sonic Youth’s discography, and I still remember my 12 or 13 year old self getting excited about music stripped to its most basic elements, and how powerful that could be.