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After several weeks of concocting plans and schedules (and scrapping them the next hour), a new five-year plan and this playlist came together. It’s built mostly around songs from the 2000s-era music-philic teen drama, The O.C. and a couple bands I found through Matador Records compilation that came out in ’97. I doubt that’s the first place I heard this week’s featured artist, but it’s possible.
Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band
“In the context of Yo La Tengo, ‘just right’ means the noise ended up being soothing instead of grating, beautiful instead of ugly.”
The author of SPIN’s review of Yo La Tengo’s 2018 release, There’s a Riot Going On, executed a tidy two-fer with that sentence, summing up both the band and the album. He (assuming “Andy” is a he) fleshes that out a little more poetically in the next sentence: “Yo La Tengo have found tenderness and soul in the sound of humming speakers and overloaded amps.”
Hoboken, New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo has out-lasted scores of their contemporaries while never achieving anything approaching mainstream success; their “peak” came when their aptly-named 2009 album, Popular Songs, clawed its way to No. 58 on Billboard’s charts. And yet the band’s two founding members, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Georgia Hubley, persevered through 14 bassists (a detail that always comes up) before bassist James McNew backed into the band and, by general agreement, completed them as an act. McNew’s arrival coincided with the band signing with its long-time label, Matador Records, and creates a very clean B.C./A.D.-style split in its career/catalog. If you’re gazing over Yo La Tengo’s catalog, Painful (1993) is the first album of the band’s long “A.D.” era. Even with Kaplan and Hubley being married almost as long as Yo La Tengo has been around (1984 versus 1987), the band is an entirely collaborative effort. They’ve given “Yo La Tengo” writing credit since 1995’s Electro-Pura and, based on McNew’s description of how they compose, that’s fitting:
“But I had never been in a band where it was like, ‘The next section of the song begins when we decide, when we’re ready.’ It was always, ‘Count to 16 and then change.’ That’s just who Ira and Georgia were, and it’s who I became. It’s a huge part of the way we play music: a real open approach.”
Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band
“In the context of Yo La Tengo, ‘just right’ means the noise ended up being soothing instead of grating, beautiful instead of ugly.”
The author of SPIN’s review of Yo La Tengo’s 2018 release, There’s a Riot Going On, executed a tidy two-fer with that sentence, summing up both the band and the album. He (assuming “Andy” is a he) fleshes that out a little more poetically in the next sentence: “Yo La Tengo have found tenderness and soul in the sound of humming speakers and overloaded amps.”
Hoboken, New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo has out-lasted scores of their contemporaries while never achieving anything approaching mainstream success; their “peak” came when their aptly-named 2009 album, Popular Songs, clawed its way to No. 58 on Billboard’s charts. And yet the band’s two founding members, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Georgia Hubley, persevered through 14 bassists (a detail that always comes up) before bassist James McNew backed into the band and, by general agreement, completed them as an act. McNew’s arrival coincided with the band signing with its long-time label, Matador Records, and creates a very clean B.C./A.D.-style split in its career/catalog. If you’re gazing over Yo La Tengo’s catalog, Painful (1993) is the first album of the band’s long “A.D.” era. Even with Kaplan and Hubley being married almost as long as Yo La Tengo has been around (1984 versus 1987), the band is an entirely collaborative effort. They’ve given “Yo La Tengo” writing credit since 1995’s Electro-Pura and, based on McNew’s description of how they compose, that’s fitting:
“But I had never been in a band where it was like, ‘The next section of the song begins when we decide, when we’re ready.’ It was always, ‘Count to 16 and then change.’ That’s just who Ira and Georgia were, and it’s who I became. It’s a huge part of the way we play music: a real open approach.”
