Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation

by Matthew Stearns

(33 1/3) $9.95

In his meditation for the delightful 33 1/3 series on Sonic Youth's famous fifth LP, Daydream Nation, writer Matthew Stearns tries to mimic the band's exuberant and transcendental sci-fi rock manifesto idiolect. I guess if you're communing with a double album that features a rush of psychedelic teen incantations—like "it's an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation" and "I'm over the city, fucking the future, I'm high inside your kiss" and "a railroad runs through the record store at night... we still flew away in the conversation" and (my favorite rock lyric to this day) "my brain is talking... my girlfriend's beautiful, looks pretty good to me"—it's easy to slip into hyper talk of your own. Bad move. Here's a typically bad sentence from Stearns: "Many of [the] fragmented narratives share a common concern with the universal, reverberating ache that persists in our memories...."

Interestingly though, in trying to throw a lasso around Sonic Youth's set of sprawling time-travel vagabond love songs, Stearns's other conceit is to discuss the epic album song by song. It's a good idea—and Stearns has forever turned me on to the fantastic tambourine I'd never noticed shaking through side two's rave up "Eric's Trip"—but his impulse for order, combined with his hankering for the hallucinatory, is a messy contradiction that backfires. Indeed, rather than distilling Sonic Youth's 14-song Tompkins Square Park electric suite, Stearns manages to create a black hole out of the band's shimmering electromagnetic galaxy. JOSH FEIT

Beasts!

edited by Jacob Covey

(Fantagraphics) $28.95

Dark, heavy-handed fantasy metal bands have lately rekindled interest in Dungeons & Dragons–style mystical geekery; like a tongue-in-cheek Monster Manual for the $100-hoodie set, Fantagraphics' Beasts! goes the opposite route with a playful sincerity embellished by sharp, mock-scientific text and imaginative illustrations. The hefty hardback brandishes its title in embossed lettering on the cover; gilded pages add to its authoritative luster. At first glance, such finery, coupled with page after page of full-color artwork by a slew of skateboard artists, poster designers, and comics illustrators, suggests no more than hipster coffee-table ornamentation. But like the ol' Monster Manual, Beasts! offers an entire realm of daydreams and nightmares—strewn with telltale footprints, tufts of foul-smelling fur, and the bones of cannibalized children—accessible to any mind brave enough to venture through it.

The 90 creatures compiled in Beasts!, from the massive, ship-swallowing Mediterranean Asp Turtle to the navel-sized electrified Thunderbeast of Japan, originate in the folklore and mythology of indigenous cultures from around the world. Some, like Bigfoot, Pegasus, the troll, and the sphinx, are familiar. Most, like Black Annis, Kabandha, Lou Carcolh, and the Cheeroonear, are not. Flipping through page after page of mutants, oddities, and physical impossibilities conjures the same state of naive disbelief that might've once given rise to these figments long ago. Many of the beasts in Beasts! are so far-out fantastic, yet described in such sober detail, that their origins as bedtime stories or campfire tales seem tangible. And then there's the inevitable, half-hearted skepticism: Can you believe people once believed in this stuff? In the 21st century, we all know there's no such thing as monsters, right? JONATHAN ZWICKEL