Album Review: Yo La Tengo - May I Sing With Me

Yo La Tengo released their fifth album, May I Sing With Me in 1992.  Opening track Detouring Americans With Guns starts out as a gentle strum before transforming into a grunted-up Velvet Underground style strum, with Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley resplendent on bored, alienated vocals.  Upside-Down is like Lou Reed fronting the Jesus and Mary Chain, roaring along, hitting the mark perfectly in two and a half minutes.  It's a great opening salvo, but after this all doesn't quite go to plan.  Mushroom Cloud of Hiss is the first of TWO nine minute tracks, and it proves to be an abrasive slog, like VU's I Heard Her Call My Name stretched out.

Swing For Life is one of a couple of downtempo, brooding tracks in the vein Sonic Youth's less intense material (a good thing).  Hubley delivers a perfectly pitched vocal on a reasonably sparse track, which allows Kaplan to spring forth with some fine guitar licks.  Five-Cornered Drone uses a similar guitar tone to great effect, this time with Kaplan taking vocal duties, while Some Kinda Fatigue is almost like Echo and the Bunnymen meets Husker Du!

The downcast, desolate Always Something is one of the the strongest tracks, helped by a fine backing vocal from bassist James McNew.  After this the album takes a turn, not necessarily for the better.  The barrelling 86-second Blowout is exactly that, and Out The Window huffs puffs without really hitting home, despite Hubley's fine drumming.  Sleeping Pills is nine minutes of experimental, keyboard drones before the album finishes with the understated, yet charming Satellite.

So an uneven, hit and miss album, which I think is the key to its charm.

Album Review: The Jesus and Mary Chain - The Power of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities

In 2008 the Jesus and Mary Chain released a 4 CD box set of B-sides.  It's wonderfully packaged in a book-like case, full of notes and photographs.  You have to ask yourself though: does anybody need nearly 4 hours and over 80 tracks of this?

The answer is, of course, yes.  The first CD contains early demo Up Too High, the extraordinary assault of their first single Upside Down and many, many more. The hilarious, deadpan, expletive-laden Cracked is included here, but on the other hand, there are acoustic versions of some of the Psychocandy material, for those who can't take the feedback.

The second CD is almost flawless, full of exuberantly bored tracks like Kill Surf City, Everything's Alright When You're Down and TWO versions of the Beach Boys' Surfing USA.  The late 80s/early 90s covered on CD3 saw some dodgy synth & drum machine experiments, though they still found time for the triumphant Something I Can't Have.

On the final CD the preponderance of acoustic-based Primal Scream-style strums (Little Stars, New York City, Taking It Away), along with covers of the Pogues (Ghost of a Smile) and Prince (Alphabet Street) sound like a band running out of steam.  However, the material remains of high quality across this hugely comprehensive collection, sure to provide months of enjoyment for the Jesus-heads amongst us. 

Film Review: Upside Down

Review for http://www.meg.ie/