Album of the Week: Yo La Tengo-Painful

I'm currently in the midst of a really nasty cold, coughing up my lungs every few minutes and blowing my nose constantly, but the one advantage is that, between my general feeling of being out of it and taking NyQuil at night, I've been in the perfect frame of body and mind to listen to Painful.

The long and short of the Yo La Tengo story is that they're a band of music nerds. Their knowledge and love of the art form is ridiculously encyclopedic, and to top that off, they've been around since 1984 (coincidentally, the year of my birth), so their discography is suitably vast and varied.

Painful falls neatly into the halfway point of their existence, released in 1993, and is something of a watershed for a number of reasons. It was the first album released on Matador after years of casting about in the indie minor leagues, an association that continues to this day. More importantly, I would call it the beginning of the 'modern' Yo La Tengo sound. Though not the first album with then-new bassist James McNew, it is the first that refined the band's sound, perfecting their noise/pop and druggy/psychedelic side with their pastoral, calm ballads and folky moments. Later albums would expand their sound even further, such as the masterpiece I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, but there is just something special about a moment when a band finally matches their unique sound to genuinely great songs, and Painful is it. Lastly, and this may be the kind of nerdy footnote that the band themselves would love, it marks the first time when the last song on the album is arguably the best.

The early 90s were something of a time when noisy bands tempered their sound to appeal to a more mainstream audience. Yo La Tengo contemporaries Sonic Youth were going through the beginnings of their accessible/classic rock influenced era at the time of Painful so it's interesting to note just how uncompromising the album is, yet it's noise and feedback are not alienating. I've never thought of Yo La Tengo as especially difficult or experimental because their rough edges are rounded off a bit. Even the explicitly noisy tracks like 'Sudden Organ' and the second version of 'Big Day Coming' use distortion and feedback as a textural/melodic device, such that it becomes a blissful, warm sound. In short, this is the kind of thing people mean when they say noise/pop, and while there's a very fine line between the two, when they're balanced just right as they are here, it is glorious. Especially while you're floating around due to illness or cold medicine.

If I were forced name my favorite Yo La Tengo album, it would never be Painful. I don't think that's an insult, really, because their discography is startlingly consistent, and it's hard to displace I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One or And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out in my estimation. All of that said, Painful is a perfectly sublime album in its own right as well as being the cornerstone upon which the modern Yo La Tengo is built. It's that rare beast: an important album and an addictively listenable one at that.