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Yo La TengoOver the years, my friends have turned me on to a sonic mountain of great music, to so many great bands I might never have gotten into otherwise that they are too numerous to document. Molasses alone gives me a dozen bands' catalogues to explore every time he makes me a mix tape. The Fall, Sally Timms, The Misfits, Modest Mouse, Magnetic Fields -- my eye has fixed on the "M"s and I could keep listing bands from that section of my collection, but I'm sure the point is well taken already: the better part of my musical taste has been guided and shaped by discoveries my friends have made. Yo La Tengo is the band that, in my circle of friends, I can proudly lay claim to having brought to the table.
Ira, Georgia, and James have released 8 albums together since then, several singles and EPs, and appeared on numerous compilations. James also does quite nicely on his own with Dump. They're the most listened to CDs I own. I'm not going to play the Velvet Underground meets The Kinks game in trying to describe their sound. Ira's voice is nasal, but if I want crooning I'll throw on a Dean Martin album. Anyways, Georgia's got the most heart-breakingly beautiful voice this side of Sally Timms. Ira's guitar is what hooked me first. The long version of "The Evil That Men Do" on President/New Wave remains my favorite stretch of guitar noise of all time. Ira's intuitive understanding of how to integrate feedback into a song is sheer brilliance. Despite the chaotic tumble of notes to noise and back, the song always sounds like a "song". Having chatted briefly with Ira and Georgia in the course of getting stuff signed over the years, and based on interviews I've read, I've concluded that they're decent human beings, good people who deserve to be supported quite aside from the fact they are simply, in my opinion, one of the best bands in the world. Links:
Yo La Tengo page by c-dog 06.14.2001 |
It was a fluke how it came about. The inordinate amount of free time I created for myself by skipping class in college, the willingness of credit card companies to extend me lines of credit so ludicrously large that today, despite being gainfully employed for something like 8 virtually uninterrupted years, I am still trying to pay off -- these factors combined to make me rabid collector of cd's. Despite spending hours trolling the aisles of numerous music stores, I'd never picked up, nevermind considered buying a Yo La Tengo CD. At the time, their first album Ride the Tiger, was already out-of-print, or at least difficult to find and the President/New Wave Hot Dogs was the only other CD they'd released. I'd never even heard a cut on the radio, college or mainstream. Fortunately, I'm also a bibliophile, another reason I'm still indentured to Chase Manhattan Bank, and was an avid reader of Mark Ziesing's catalogue. Sometime in 1989, Lucius Shepard, a writer I admire still, listed some of the bands he was listening to at the moment in the catalogue. I'm not sure why the name Yo La Tengo jumped out at me, but it did and I picked their CD to buy. I loved it so much I went out and bought a bunch of the other bands he listed. (Fields of the Nephilim didn't work out, but Screaming Tree made it into heavy rotation on my player.)