More than just one!

Album Title: 
Electr-O-Pura
Band Name: 
Yo La Tengo
Release Year: 
1995

This is an album that I cannot believe is over a decade old already. Amazing. It still sounds current, still sounds exciting, still sounds like it has urgency and meaning, still sounds just plain good. This album has been showing up quite often in my itunes shuffle rotation. It is something that I never could quite place just hearing it in the background. However, once it finally came to me that all these songs I was hearing were on one album, and that it was a yo la tengo album, i got a little hooked.

Starting with Decora (which Spoon covers on a compilation album by the Believer Magazine of favorite indie covers by other indies) you know you are off to a good start. The album as a whole has a nice combination of noise and melody and excitement and energy and just the perfect hint of quiteness to bring it down a notch in just the right places.

“Tom Courtenay,” track 4, is one of my favorite songs on the album. The opening has the correct amount of memorable melody and memorable lyrics - “Hilary Christie, the rumors are true...” great opening lines. The songs placement in the order makes the Tom Coutenay suddenly rock pretty hard.

As a whole there is a nice flow from song to song, a general cohesive feel to all the songs without them all simply sounding the same. I love that in an album. There are some sonic refernces to the Velvet Underground in the types and durations of distorted song endings, particularly the song “Attack on Love,” a sort of sonic battle which sounds as though it could have come of of the Velvet underground and Nico.

Yo La Tengo has just released a new record called “I am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass,” wow! The new album shows remarkable growth over the last decade. Now there are several albums in between, but just listening to the two in a row shows that it is still the same band, but that they have a new matured sound that has lost the angst but gained a wry wit that shows in smart piano parts and milder distorted guitars, flutterly falseto vocal lines and lovely, snappy drum parts.