Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Yo La Tengo
My wife is a practical Midwesterner and doesn’t have a lot of patience for songs that go on for more than three minutes. If we’re playing a CD in the car and a guitar solo stretches on for more than eight bars, she’ll hit the skip button. She doesn’t mind if a song gets noisy or weird, so long as it’s over quickly. One of her favorites is Guided By Voices, that band of Midwesterners who indulged their every drunken whim but were polite enough to end each song before it repeated itself.
Yo La Tengo, on the other hand, presents problems. She loves Fakebook, the band’s (mostly) covers album, and she likes sweet, pop-ish original songs such as “Sugarcube” and “Hey Mr. Tough.” But when we last saw Yo La Tengo together a few years ago, she got antsy whenever one of Ira Kaplan’s skronky guitar solos stretched on for a while, or when Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew locked into a krautrock- or Sun Ra–inspired groove and held it until time seemed to stand still.
She’s got a point: Yo La Tengo gets more than a little self-indulgent at times. The new album, Popular Songs, ends with a suite of three songs with a combined running time of more than 36 minutes — much of it with no vocals, no drum beats, and only minimal guitar and bass.
But I like that side of Yo La Tengo almost as much as I like the “Sugarcube” side. And to me, the remarkable thing is that Yo La Tengo has mastered these two seemingly incongruous styles, and many more. If you don’t like one song, just wait a minute — or 36. You’ll like the next one.
YO LA TENGO: Soma, Friday, October 16, 7 p.m. 858-226-7663. $20.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo
My wife is a practical Midwesterner and doesn’t have a lot of patience for songs that go on for more than three minutes. If we’re playing a CD in the car and a guitar solo stretches on for more than eight bars, she’ll hit the skip button. She doesn’t mind if a song gets noisy or weird, so long as it’s over quickly. One of her favorites is Guided By Voices, that band of Midwesterners who indulged their every drunken whim but were polite enough to end each song before it repeated itself.
Yo La Tengo, on the other hand, presents problems. She loves Fakebook, the band’s (mostly) covers album, and she likes sweet, pop-ish original songs such as “Sugarcube” and “Hey Mr. Tough.” But when we last saw Yo La Tengo together a few years ago, she got antsy whenever one of Ira Kaplan’s skronky guitar solos stretched on for a while, or when Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew locked into a krautrock- or Sun Ra–inspired groove and held it until time seemed to stand still.
She’s got a point: Yo La Tengo gets more than a little self-indulgent at times. The new album, Popular Songs, ends with a suite of three songs with a combined running time of more than 36 minutes — much of it with no vocals, no drum beats, and only minimal guitar and bass.
But I like that side of Yo La Tengo almost as much as I like the “Sugarcube” side. And to me, the remarkable thing is that Yo La Tengo has mastered these two seemingly incongruous styles, and many more. If you don’t like one song, just wait a minute — or 36. You’ll like the next one.
YO LA TENGO: Soma, Friday, October 16, 7 p.m. 858-226-7663. $20.
Comments