How To Survive a Whiskey Hangover With The Field and Meteos

There is nothing on Earth like a whiskey hangover. It is similar to other hangovers, but somehow worse, more vile and life altering. You wake up in the late morning, and you think you might have gone blind, so you peek one eye open, which somehow hurts. Then you open both eyes and look around the room, a process that hurts even more--sunlight streams in the window, sending a hot light knife into the area behind your eyes which throbs appropriately. The hardest part (well, one of them, anyway) is getting up and out of bed.

Once you do, go to the bathroom and splash some numbingly cold water on your face. Drink a glass or two of water. If it stays down, proceed to try to eat some food. Try to keep the food down. Drink some really strong tea or coffee. Wait a few minutes. Take some aspirin or Tylenol and some nasal decongestant (for some reason when I drink my nose gets really clogged up). Still keeping it all down?? Starting to feel a bit better?? It's time to take your mind off the pain and sickness. No, don't drink more!!

I used to try to medicate hangovers with noise. I thought that it would blow all the bad shit out of my brain through sheer agony. But now I'm more about soothing my brain with repetitive, mellow music. I have discovered that From Here We Go Sublime by The Field is perfect for this. Attach a drool cup to your face and put this on with the iTunes visualizer running. Much better.

For further relief, dig out Meteos for the Nintendo DS. No, not the fucking Disney version. The original. Haven't played it in awhile, have you?? Feels good, doesn't it?? Yes. It might not be as hypnotic as its more popular, readily available brother Lumines, but I find it easier on a hangover.

Assuming you did puke at some point, drink some water, nibble on some dry cereal, and lay on the couch all day watching whatever is on the History Channel or Discovery. Documentaries are the best TV show for getting over a hangover.

Of course, the ultimate hangover cure, as stated in Knocked Up, is to get stoned. But assuming you're like me and don't have access to said substance, I think the above will do you just fine.

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.

It bears mentioning (does it bear mentioning??)

I suppose I should've made this clear in my first post, but we aren't going to update on weekends. We are but men, men with the need to rest and replenish. Speaking of which, I am currently down with disease, as some folks say, and I get to work all day tomorrow so even if I wanted to update today or tomorrow, it would be feverish dreams far stranger than you should normally expect from me--updates which are still pretty strange, all told.

Actually, I reserve the right to rescind this rule should the mood and inspiration strike me simultaneously.

Also, while I'm at it, I'll speak for CJ and I--because I'm presumptuous like that, god damnit--and state for the record that even though we're trying to post something everyday from Monday through Friday, we will probably miss from time to time. It just happens when you're doing something as a labor of love and not as an occupation. However if I ever somehow become wealthy enough to do this as a living, or even semi-living, know that I would update everyday, unlike, say, VGCats, that subpar webcomic that manages new content once every console generation.

But I digress. My eyes hurt and the only thing I have the energy to do is lay in bed and listen to old GFW podcats.