| Daydream Nation | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 154 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1960
Category: Music
Artist: Sonic Youth
Publisher: Geffen Records
Studio: Geffen Records
Manufacturer: Geffen Records
Label: Geffen Records
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 4.7 x 0.4
MPN: 24515
UPC: 720642451526
EAN: 0720642451526
ASIN: B000003TAL
Release Date: November 23, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Tracks:
| • | Teen Age Riot | | • | Silver Rocket | | • | The Sprawl | | • | 'Cross the Breeze | | • | Eric's Trip | | • | Total Trash | | • | Hey Joni | | • | Providence | | • | Candle | | • | Rain King | | • | Kissability | | • | Trilogy: The Wonder | | • | Trilogy: Hyperstation | | • | Trilogy: Eliminator Jr. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 149 more reviews...
 One of the best reachable Sonic Youth Albums November 10, 2008
This is a great album. It is one of my favorite Sonic Youth albums. Unlike a lot of their albums this one is not so experimental in sound, and is easier to listen to. If you have a Sonic Youth itch and you are not sure which album to start with this one is a good choice.
 I don't get it November 3, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's dissonant, chaotic and pretentious. I hate not being able to appreciate it because so many people do. I'll keep trying and get back to you.
A Classic June 9, 2008
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.
Sonic Youth's raison d'etre March 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 Daydream Nation March 3, 2008
Sonic Youth-Daydream Nation ****1/2
Before my first listen to Daydream Nation was over I was wondering what they hell is going on here? This was somewhere around the song 'Candle' that I began to ask myself that. I was thinking this is one of the most intellegent and revolutionary albums I have ever heard, but I was also thinking this is one of the strangest albums of all time, which I guess is why they call a band like Sonic Youth alternative. You see I always liked Sonic Youth, well most of their songs anyway, but I couldn't totally appreciate them at first, which to some may seem frustraiting knowing a band is great and not being able to understand why, while for me I loved that and found it highly rewarding when I finally did get it.
Songs like that almost hit single, and album opener 'Teen Age Riot' leave no wonder as to what it is that is so amazing about Sonic Youth. This is perhaps the most commercially exceptable song that I have ever heard Sonic Youth record and yet there is still nothing commercially exceptable about it. 'The Sprawl' and 'Kissability' pure Kim Gorden songs done in that almost spoken word form that she would later become known for. 'Erics Trip' might be the best song on the album as it offers everything presented in all the other songs on the album just wrapped into one. 'Total Crash' follows 'Erics Trip' as that hardest rocker on the album full of great sound collages and guitar work from Thursten as well as some of his most impressive lyrics. 'Candle' still to this day blows me away at how amazing it is. A song that must be heard to appreciate. While it is not the best song on the album it may be the most inspired. Closing the album is 'Trilogy' a three part song starting with 'a) The Wonder' is a rocking soud collage of feeling while 'b)Hyperstation' is a socially commited-melow-dramatic cinama of a song with 'c)Eliminator Jr.' as conclusion to an essay recycling everything in the album already into one final closing statement by Kim Gorden.
Every noise, every word, basically everything heard on Daydream Nation is ment to symbolize something in America during the time of this albums release in 1988 when the country was still Reagan Nation. This genius piece of music deserves only the highest of praise. Daydream Nation was the first album to really put Sonic Youth on the map and earn them the massive cult following that they now have. Worth every bit of hype it ever was given.
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