#141 The Best Album of 2000, Round 2, Match #77: Yo La Tengo vs. Emmylou Harris
Hey folks-
Today’s Best Album of 2000 match is:
#5 Yo La Tengo, AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE-OUT
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vs.
#69 Emmylou Harris, RED DIRT GIRL
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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email (kentmbeeson@hey.com) or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
Last time AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE-OUT competed, I published @bsglaser’s Designated Cheerleader for it; you can find that here. Today, we have another DC for NOTHING, this time by @vtforestbull. Take it away!
AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE OUT is the follow-up to 1997's I CAN HEAR THE HEART BEATING AS ONE, and as always the album that comes after a milestone runs the risk of letdown. Many regard that album as Yo La Tengo's best, and songwise it might be -- certainly as singles go they haven't surpassed "Autumn Sweater" either in reach or in the distillation of their ethos into a single song. But the band was never going to retrace its steps, and anyway as it turned out they had bigger plans for this next one.
AND THEN NOTHING is a long album, 77 minutes long -- long even by the standards of the CD era, basically a double LP -- and the songs tend to run long: only "Madeline" (one of a long and proud lineage of wistful bangers that Georgia always manages to conjure up) is under four minutes, and a few are substantially longer than that. More than that, the songs move at a distinctly unhurried pace, and for the most part they are fairly abstract as pop songs; an elongated verse or two, a repeated refrain, the organs and synths given space to evolve. For a band otherwise so enamored of songcraft this was a distinct departure. Most of all the tone is quiet, the dynamic shifts of the music more subtle than the band's usual modes of warped fuzzy pop and incendiary noise freakout. You might need to turn up the volume to get the full measure of the band's intent here.
But while (mostly) quiet, this is an album of quiet intensity. ("Mostly" because if you do turn up the volume to become better absorbed in the album's hypnotic patterns, then "Cherry Chapstick" will land like an anvil of confused longing in the middle of the proceedings.) Before this we knew Yo La Tengo as reticent, sometimes voluble in their anxiety but never really giving up their position, their narration of their emotional states delivered more-or-less offhandedly. On AND THEN NOTHING the band found a way to turn their introversion inside out, giving voice to unexpected fears and desires. If they do this in hushed voices, almost reverently amidst the slowly unfolding drones, it is because the stakes are at their highest. "I wanna cross my heart / I wanna hope to die," they intone together, a prayer of devotion that goes much deeper than anything we've heard from them before. Even the album's emotional center, the luxurious "You Can Have It All", emerges like a brief sunburst on a cloudy day but does not dispel the sense of intimate urgency.
AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE OUT is Yo La Tengo's pinnacle, ultimately, because the band is at its heart a married couple, and it is the pinnacle of the expression of their marriage in musical form. It might in fact be the finest available expression of a musical marriage built on stability, rather than the volatility or contingency of so many other couples-as-bands or bands-with-couples. (For a long time it was popular to consider Ira and Georgia as a sort of minor-key parallel to the more visible example of Sonic Youth; but Kim's aesthetic was always a lot more independent in outlook, and in the end even Thurston couldn't manage to not fuck things up.)
My wife and I didn't meet until a few years later, and when we did we decided pretty quickly to make it a permanent arrangement. It will be sixteen years together this fall. Somewhere in my subconscious, AND THEN NOTHING became part of the formula for what it looks like to build a relationship -- not flashy, not always necessarily obvious to others, but one that lasts, one you can depend on. Quiet, but intense about what matters to you. Part of our thing is a shared love of music, and this album quickly became one of her favorites as well -- "Our Way to Fall" was on one of the mix CDs I made to commemorate the wedding. These are the things that you carry with you together on a long journey.
"Night Falls on Hoboken" is the album's final track. Its listed run time is seventeen minutes, but for all practical purposes it never really ends, the slow lock-groove bass line reverberating forever, because that is the intended duration of Yo La Tengo's real project.
Thank you, @vtforestbull!
As always, click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.
Yesterday, #20 Erykah Badu, MAMA'S GUN defeated #45 Cat Power, THE COVERS RECORD, 79-19-2.
Thanks for reading!
Kent