Sonic Youth

New Yorkers Sonic Youth are among the most daring bands in the history of rock, as well as one of the most imitated acts of the last two decades. Even today, the disciples of their "noise wave" are countless, built on an atypical yet by-now unmistakable guitar style in which there's no distinction between rhythm and lead, since everything converges into a disharmonic flow. With their nihilistic, irreverent ethic - a legacy of the punk era - and their ostentatious rejection of the music business and the conformism that defines it, they became almost the prototype of the "indie band". At least until a major label took notice of them, laying its "longa manus" over their work.

The band came together during the Noise Fest, organized in 1981 at White Columns by guitarist Thurston Moore. Besides Moore, the band featured second guitarist Lee Ranaldo (already part of Glenn Branca's entourage) and bassist Kim Gordon (a former art student in Los Angeles, as well as Moore's partner). The ensemble's musical touchstones were mainly the most extreme punk scene, garage-rock, a few elements of industrial music, and the deafening "avant-garde" symphonies of Glenn Branca. This repertoire was already on display in their debut EP, "Sonic Youth" (1982), which marks a meeting point between the musics that had influenced them.

The following year came the debut album "Confusion Is Sex", revolutionary and extreme. The next one, "Bad Moon Rising" (1984), unfolds as a long, tense, dissonant psychedelic suite: its singular fusion of styles suggests an ideal meeting between Grateful Dead and Velvet Underground. In 1985 came "Evol", another excellent album that leans mainly on harmonious melodies, torn apart though by out-of-tune guitars and the shouted or flattened vocals of Moore or Gordon. "Sister", released the following year, is a further step in that direction.

But it's in 1988, with "Daydream Nation", that the Sonic Youth sound reaches perfect definition. Psychic imbalance, urban apocalypse, metallic noise and insistent percussiveness converge in a double "manifesto" album that unveils the other face of the American Dream ("I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell", Gordon declaims in a fatally decadent tone). Sonic Youth's antagonistic rage burns itself out in a mad dash toward the abyss of that Death Valley celebrated in their early days.

"Daydream Nation" is the definitive compendium of Sonic Youth's guitar-driven sound. Lee Ranaldo reproduces every kind of noise with extreme distortion, Thurston Moore backs him up and completes the picture, while Kim Gordon handles the ever-present bass undertow alongside the drums, before unleashing her icy voice; and over this chaotic interplay looms an obsessive, inescapable percussiveness.

The valve-driven distortion of the six strings is the ensemble's trademark: white-hot noise that helps paint frescoes of grim urban tension. But every element of the Sonic Youth sound is brought to full fruition, in a maturation process that borders on the extraordinary. Each track, in fact, reveals an unprecedented sonic cohesion and a careful, deep experimentalism that's never an end in itself.

The album, with its unmistakable "dark" cover (a lit candle against a black background), is pervaded by a constant satirical streak. This intent is evident right from the start, entrusted to the memorable riff of "Teen Age Riot", an overwhelming rock anthem, an instant knockout. It's the cry of the other America, the "underground" one, dreaming of escaping the grip of Reaganism. The equally torrential "Total Trash", an acid jam reminiscent of Reed, likewise evokes protests and slogans. Every track has a beginning, a development and an end, flowing smoothly without giving up any kind of sonic excursion. The masterpiece "Trilogy" - nearly fourteen minutes of pure delirium - comprises three movements: the first, "Wonder", tight and dissonant, with a hallucinated, sarcastic lyric; the second, "Hyperstation", is instead steeped in an atmosphere of psychic imbalance - a horror-tinged mood over which the guitar embroiders stinging scales - while the closing "Eliminator Jr" is distorted hardcore played at breakneck speed.

The album also makes room for garage-rock ballads like "Eric's Trip" and "Hey Jony", as well as psychedelic tracks with a suggestively "alienating" effect, like "Kissability" and "The Sprawl", gems of Gordon's beguiling vocals. "Silver Rocket" and "Rain King", built on towering walls of guitars and deafening distortion, are further noise-rock hurricanes, while on "Candle" Ranaldo's guitar twists and coils in on itself to the point of anguish.

"Daydream Nation" isn't just a classic: it's a watershed in the history of rock. With its thunderous bacchanals, miraculously tied to pop harmonies, it marks a new frontier for noise applied to the song format. Because, yes, songs - however avant-garde - are still what we're talking about when it comes to Sonic Youth. And if we can talk about "noise-rock" today, the credit is largely theirs.

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10/11/2006