423. Yo La Tengo, "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One"

 

Everyone has albums that remind them of a particular time and place, and this one for me is Santa Cruz in 1998.  I was living there then and I have an extremely specific memory of listening to this album while driving down Highway 1 near the 41st Avenue exit.  No idea why.

Approximate view of my very specific sense memory of this album.

None of this has anything to do with this album itself.  If you like Yo La Tengo, and I do, you will like this album.  Yo La Tengo is another one of those bands with an extremely specific sound.  If a Yo La Tengo song comes on, you will immediately go "Hey, this is Yo La Tengo." They're like the easy listening version of My Bloody Valentine, and I mean that as a compliment.

And there are some all time classic YLT songs on this album, like "Sugarcube" and "Deeper Into Movies" and "Autumn Sweater" and their cover of "Little Honda."  The only real clunker is "My Little Corner of the World," which sounds like a children's song and was originally done by Anita Bryant, yuck, although the band apparently did not know that when they recorded it.  "We're an American Band" is not, on the other hand, a cover, ha ha.  Or maybe it's a completely deconstructed cover, in the sense that both it and the Grand Funk Railroad song use musical notes.

I saw YLT a few years ago at Outside Lands and was struck for the first time with what I thought was a brilliant insight but probably isn't - they're kind of a jam band!  I know, not that great an insight.  But they did do a couple of extended jams that were okay I guess but I'm not a huge fan of extended jams.