Song, by Toad

Yo La Tengo and The Wedding Present count as two of my favourite bands.  Both of them I absolutely hated at first listen, too.  Both I owe to my friend James Strath who played them repeatedly, amidst a shower of scorn, over the course of our five years at uni together, until I finally caved in and embraced both bands as my own.  In fact most of what I so wittily called ‘Strath’s Shit Music Collection’ has in fact ended up pretty much at the forefront of my own shit music collection in the intervening years.  So the joke’s on… erm, yes, let’s move along shall we.

For The Wedding Present that came with the release of Mini in about, erm, 1995 or 6 was it?  For Yo La Tengo it was much later.  I bought the Little Honda EP and Ride the Tiger immediately after uni, but I think it was And Then Something Turned Itself Inside Out, from very early in 2000, that was the moment the penny finally and permanently dropped.

The funny thing is, once you get into a group you can go back and really, really enjoy songs that previously put your back right up.  I remember when Strath used to play Painful, now one of my favourite albums in the world, I used to scoff at tracks like Big Day Coming for being repetitive and boring: no hook, going nowhere, what are you listening to, man?

Somehow, after my conversion, I love Big Day Coming in both its incarnations on Painful.  Yo La Tengo occasionally exercise a habit of building tension through this kind of underlying beat, a repetitive signature, and then slowly ratcheting the noise up further and further until that underlying structure is all but obliterated by howling feedback.  In this case that signature simmers along, threatening to break out, but never quite does, which is just as effective.

Of course if I’d just read the above paragraph at the time I’d have told myself I was talking pretentious bollocks…

Yo La Tengo – Big Day Coming
Yo La Tengo – From a Motel 6
Yo La Tengo – Sudden Organ