Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (108 of them)
one year passes...
was quite a bit of DN talk on the recent "best of the 80s" thread, but that's faded out, so i thought i'd post here.
picked up a copy of the "deluxe" 4 lp box the other day, after meaning to for a couple years. listened to it several times since, though just the first two discs, the album proper. and it's been a while, probably 10 years since i owned a physical copy. it's one of those records that i loved absolutely to DEATH, in an obsessive, "this band changed my life!" sense for many years - but then kinda got tired of. or rather just didn't need to hear anymore...
anyway, i find that i still love it to death, though not as much as i once did, and that it seems narrower and tamer than it did in it's moment (in my mental version of its moment, anyway). less like a revolution and more like a rock record. i suppose that's to the band's credit, as it reflects how much they altered the landscape of the world by their presence, eventually molding it into something that might comfortably accommodate them. it's also probably a product of my growing up, the glum accumulation of smallifying perspective.
i also picked up a copy of ciccone youth's whitey album, really a sort of DN companion piece, as they were released just weeks apart. it's amazing how much brilliant material they were spinning off at that point, and with what seemingly offhand casualness. i find that i now enjoy the whitey album a great deal more than DN, probably due to its variety, experimentation and humor. DN comes across as a manifesto of sorts, as this fully developed STATEMENT, and as such it can seem a bit one-dimensional. i mean, it's a big dimension, but it's still just the one.
and that observation makes me think of evol and sister, the two records that preceded DN, and to which it inevitably gets compared by people (like me sometimes) who want to take a swing at DN's indie-canonical primacy. the main difference between DN and those two records is textural. evol's feel matches its back cover: a smeary pinkish watercolor with scrawled handwriting and a bedheaded picture of the terrifyingly young-looking band cut into the shape of a crude heart. it's hazy, gauzy, smeary and raw. it feels homemade, hacked out, almost aimless and catastrophically stoned. achy bruised like waking up the morning after a hundred drinks & smokes the night before. in some ways it's similar to DN - especially in that it maintains a darkly menacing tone throughout - but its haphazard roughness is at odds with DN's purposefulness and sleekness.
sister changed this game up by presenting a patchwork of contrasting textures. it's mock punk here, almost pop there, much more aggressive overall, but it's still got evol's gnarly, raw & tender squall as a sort of glue to hold everything together. i guess you could say that it, too, matches its cover art: an assortment of seemingly unrelated snapshots, mashed together in a psychedelic collage. most crucially to me, as a fan, it lifted the veil of cryptic gloom so that you could see a variety of contrasting personalities through the murk. it was funny, scary, ramshackle, ambitious but unfocused, dumb, smart and often all these things at once.
DN is neither wildly varied and experimental, like sister (i guess they saved the experiments & jokes for the whitey album and master-dik), nor intimate and haunting like evol. instead, it's towering, impenetrable, and very tightly controlled. the songs only wander when they intend to make a point of their wandering, the band lyrics only occasionally crack a smile, and it's very hard to tell quite what it's all about. it's easy enough to catch a few seemingly key phrases in each song, but they're slippery and oblique. the lyrics seem to be talking to themselves, rather than to you. this approach isn't alienating, in fact it's inviting in its mystery, but it does make the record seem a bit impersonal. in the liner notes, byron coley waxes mystified (and perhaps a bit conceited) about how no one ever gets the real meaning behind most of the songs - but come on dude, it's not like they were giving us much to go on.
the relative directness and humor of side 4 go a long way towards personalizing the album, and so side 4 does give lie to my earlier claim about the album's one-dimensionality, but i sometimes that feel that it's too little too late. while i love daydream nation, no question, sides 1-3 have a tendency to go by in a steel-gray blur (leftfield moments like total trash, rain king and providence excepted).
anyway, it's a magnificent album, but i can see why i've listened to it so infrequently over the past few years. it's more about the totality than the niches, implications and wanderings, so maybe when you get it, you've just got it.
i kinda hinted at another big textural difference between DN & what came before in that talk about "evol's gnarly, raw & tender squall". there's a weird kind of agonized-yet-narcotized hurt present in their earlier work that DN almost entirely excises. on evol and sister, to a lesser extent, there's this weird sort of bleary, self-comforting self-laceration, like poking at a bruise to see how it's coming along, or curling into a fetal position to mitigate pain.
at the same time, evol and sister are druggy as hell, with lots of cryptic wanderings and dead-eyed psychedelic drool. that too gets scaled way back on DN, becoming more an element in the background than a real front & center focus. the devolution of total trash being the album's only real drool-out, and even that feels a bit methodical in comparison to the random scuzzed guitar hairballs that litter the previous records.
and again, the cover art is a dead giveaway for this fairly dramatic shift in focus.
one year passes...
four years pass...
nine months pass...
one month passes...
one year passes...
five months pass...