20YAT #19 Yo La Tengo – I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One
UK album chart peak: did not chart
Yo La Tengo’s eighth album made no impact on British music beyond a couple of brief but favourable write-ups in the music press (“highly good”, said Select, reflecting the general consensus). With twenty years’ hindsight, though, that feels like a missed opportunity, both for band and potential audience. After all, amid 1997’s genre paroxysms on the UK albums chart that had already seen records full of strident guitar fuzz, close-cropped electronica, post-ironic reinterpretations of 60s songs and jangly melodic pop grow in influence and popular appeal, here was a collection of all of that, all on one disc.
What’s more, where stylistically restless records often feel like second-hand furniture shops, incongruous pieces piled on top of one another so densely that it’s impossible to gauge the true worth of anything, I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One offers a very modern sense of space and leisure to its sprawl. Indeed, its first half remains as beautifully sequenced as any album released that year: driftwood instrumentals fade into scabrous noise, dainty melody sits alongside almost-groovy electronic manipulation, and yet running through all the diversity is a sense of gently cerebral, idiosyncratic melancholy.
Even today, in a Spotified landscape that emphasises genre bait and switch, I Can Hear The Heart’s second half still wanders a little – ten-minute feedback diversions and meta-ironic tracks like We’re An American Band (not a cover of the Grand Funk Railroad song, but instead a semi-reimagining of the gist of that song, if Grand Funk Railroad had been a hard-working experimental alternative college radio band who drove their own tour van and went to afternoon movies, instead of partying with groupies on the backs of Harleys) are a tough sell, regardless of whether the clipped, patriotic pep of Britpop has just happened or is a distant memory – and the frustration remains that the album is about ten minutes of editing away from being flawless.
Slight bloat notwithstanding, though, the album’s most binding characteristics – tired-but-explorative, forward-looking, dreamy-but-agitated and wistfully poignant – render it almost unendingly intriguing and, with albums by Radiohead and Spiritualized that capitalise on these very feelings lurking on the horizon, strangely prescient too.
In 2017, I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One tends to duke it out with 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out whenever discussions about Yo La Tengo’s best albums arise. The latter has more focus, but nonetheless, the former stands as one of the finest records by one of the great modern alternative rock bands, and is lent added flavour by being, in it’s own rambling, experimental, introspective and melancholic way, a perfect microcosm of the year of its birth.
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Also out this week:
Supergrass – In It For The Money (Parlophone). Chart peak #2
The Charlatans – Tellin’ Stories (Beggars Banquet). Chart peak #1
