Music I Found Through MusicBanter - Pt. 3/5
Yo La Tengo – Dreadnaught
I’m not a fan of jam bands. I don’t like things that are “groovy” and outside of band practice I don’t care much for improvisation in music. This is certainly due more to the fact that I’m terrible at ad-libbing and too neurotic to really enjoy it, and I’ve been told one too many times that “you’re a hippy, you would LOVE Phish”. As mentioned in my previous post, I focus more on lyrics and melodies when listening to music, so it’s hard for me to appreciate bands that fit into this category. When I first heard Yo La Tengo back in the summer of 2009, I more or less wrote them off as another jam band that wouldn’t do anything for me.
But, surprisingly enough, a couple of weeks after dismissing
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind, I found myself wanting to listen to it again. I believe it was included in a compilation Dreadnaught posted that I found and downloaded from the 10 Track Mix-Tape thread, so I pulled it up in iTunes and gave it another shot. I ended up listening to it several times in a row, head nodding, toes tapping. I downloaded the album and burnt it onto a cd and went for a drive (this is another way in which I assess how good a song or album is… if I listen to it in my car and it makes me want to drive to the beach then I know it’s really good – but more on that later).
After exploring the rest of the album I soon went in search of everything Yo La Tengo. For a couple of months YLT was all I was listening to. I went to see them that fall and have since seen them a handful of other times at festivals and in small pre-show coffee shop or record store gigs. They’re apparently notorious for never playing the same show twice, which both impresses me and makes me feel anxious – I can’t imagine what that would be like. To be so confident in your material that you don’t just play your hits or the songs that are easy repeatedly… but the members are all clearly incredibly talented and seem very genuine. You can see throughout their discography that they love the music they make they love creating and sharing it, and as a fan that’s a great thing to observe.
Yo La Tengo does melancholy well, which is something I’m drawn to, but they also are really good at doing upbeat and happy without (always) being cheesy or annoyingly poppy. When I listen to YLT I’m always reminded of autumn. Their music is warm and holds onto the lightheartedness of summer but still maintains the edge of an approaching winter.
The first song I heard:
Current Favorite Song:
Current Favorite Album: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
Another artist Dreadnaught introduced me to: WHY?, Doseone and the entire Anticon scene.
*BONUS!*
My Cover of a Yo La Tengo song: