#196 The Best Album of 2000, Round 5, Match #122: Radiohead vs. Yo La Tengo
Hey folks,
Today’s Best Album of 2000 match is:
#4 Radiohead, KID A
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vs.
#5 Yo La Tengo, AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE-OUT
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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.
We have two Designated Cheerleaders today, they’re both for AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE-OUT, and they’re from @bsglaser and @vtforestbull! First, take it away @bsglaser!
When Yo La Tengo released AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE OUT in February 2000, my best friend JP had a year left to live. He wouldn't have known that, exactly, but he'd had cancer come and go a couple of times already, so it was certainly on his mind. We didn't really talk about that too much--instead we often talked about Yo La Tengo, a key band we'd bonded over in the early 90s.
YLT was one of the ways to check in and stay connected after college. I lived in Philadelphia and JP was in New York, which was a little bit of distance but close enough for one of us to travel to shows in the other's city. So we saw YLT shows at the Troc and TLA in Philly, at Tramps, Irving Plaza and the Bowery Ballroom (among several venues) in NY, and sometimes at Maxwell's in Hoboken as a sort of middle ground. It was always a ton of fun, and I could write 1,000+ words about all of the times we saw them together.
When the records came out, we'd discuss them on the phone or via email (we had AOL accounts!), picking apart individual tracks, recognizing songs we'd already heard live ("Autumn Sweater" was "that one with James at the little drum station" we'd seen them do at Tramps; Ira had pulled out a black acoustic guitar for "Our Way to Fall" at the Matador anniversary show a couple of months back, etc.), and fitting the albums into the narrative of the band. As such, the first couple of listens to ATNTIIO got reduced to praise as "PAINFUL with beats!"
Sure, that's not a great description of an album with this much depth and detail and range of sound and feeling, but we had busy day jobs, and I swear we said a lot more of it as we listened again and again. Which you needed to do with YLT records: JP and I had long since agreed that it took a while for each of their albums to reveal themselves, and you had to stick with them, let them grow inside your head. And this one certainly did! What initially sounded only quiet (except for "Cherry Chapstick"), drum machine-heavy (which, I guess it is a little, but many of the best songs have Georgia behind the kit) and more monochromatic than the exuberant variety of the previous LP (I CAN HEAR THE HEART BEATING AS ONE) eventually blossomed and earned its spot as one of their all-time best albums. People feel passionately about it, as they should. (Heck, my bracket for this tourney is called "I Made Our Wedding Band Learn 'Our Way to Fall.'")
It's definitely not "PAINFUL with beats," but it does take the cohesive depth of feeling the band achieved on PAINFUL and combine it with the wider range of sounds and instrumentation they'd been building up, slowly, over the last several years. It's also maybe the record that best leveraged the contributions of James McNew into the trio's sound; if he'd been the new bass player in 1992, he was by now sort of the music director who provided the organizational principles inside of which he, Ira and Georgia could go in any and every direction while still sounding like YLT.
That was especially clear for the initial leg of the ATNTIIO tour. These new songs had a lot of detail and sophistication, much of which would be difficult for the trio to pull off live. So they didn't try: instead, they brought in auxiliary players--Superchunk's Mac McCaughan and The Clean's David Kilgour played various parts as needed, meaning Georgia could come up front to sing while Mac played drums, Ira could be on keys while Kilgour handled the guitar, and generally there were two extra sets of hands, feet and voices to make every song really take off and fill the room with all of the album's sonic promises.
Having friends around also seemed to give the band permission to have a little more fun. For the cover of George McRae's "You Can Have It All," Georgia, Mac, and Kilgour played the song while Ira and James did a funny bit of Motown-lite choreography under a disco ball. It didn't rock out in any way, but it was a silly and fun highlight of the evening.
As it happened, adult-ish schedules had meant JP and I didn't get to see the ATNTIIO tour together. I saw it first in Philly, and he caught them 3 days later in NYC. He'd asked me how the show was, and I told him it was great--plus, there was something new he was going to love. I didn't want to spoil it, so I said he'd know it when he saw it. I actually made it up to NY the day after the show, and when I asked what he'd thought, JP smiled and started doing the "You Can Have It All" dance. It was a bummer we hadn't seen it together, but maybe they'd still be doing the dance the next time we went to a YLT show together.
The next time was 5 months later at Irving Plaza. I was living in NYC now, but JP was sick again--his cancer was back, and another round of treating it didn't promise much. We had to be in the balcony because he couldn't stand for the show, and I think we had to leave before the encore. I don't remember if they were still doing the dance, because it was the only YLT show that I ever left feeling sadder than when I walked in. It was the last time we saw the band together, and JP was dead at age 29 about half a year later.
I don't mean for this DC to be such a bummer, but part of doing these tournaments is about the memories these records are tied to. And I'll try to turn it around (or maybe more appropriately turn it inside out) by saying that despite all of this, I still absolutely love and adore ATNTIIO--it's one of the records I point people to if they're looking to get into YLT, and it's easily near the top of the pile I'm most likely to reach for and listen to all of these years later. It's not too much to say that Yo La Tengo is a special kind of band, and their music, if you give it the time and attention it deserves and listen to it with people who are important to you, will rewire you in all the good ways.
Thanks again, @bsglaser! And for our second DC, here comes @vtforestbull!
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.
Thanks again for that, @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, #1 OutKast, STANKONIA defeated #9 The Avalanches, SINCE I LEFT YOU, 91-43.
Thanks, everyone! Whatever happens in today’s match, I hope it’s exciting!
Kent