Yo La Tengo
I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One

THE REVIEW

Choosing a Yo La Tengo album is not easy. One of the very few bands, alongside Fugazi and even more than Sonic Youth, to have maintained a huge qualitative standard throughout their career, adhering to a simple precept: expressive freedom. Nothing more, nothing less. That Ira Kaplan manages to give great uniformity to the material covered in his compositions is undeniable: every Yo La Tengo track breathes psychedelic melancholy; but it's a band that can be supposed to have embraced practically every musical genre, without exaggeration. And not only.

Yo La Tengo are an institution, born in 1984, they have maintained the legendary status of one of the first true American indie bands, more influential than many better-known groups. But that's not enough. The true greatness of this band lies in that unique atmosphere they manage to convey. Each of their pieces has the scent and climate of a journey... in this regard, without exaggerating, Yo La Tengo much more than many celebrated singer-songwriters, first in music than in lyrics embody the legacy of the American folk tradition, that of Woody Guthrie, of whom they fully reflect certainly not so much the form but certainly the artistic intentions.

"I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One", at this point needs no particular in-depth analysis, because it is the album that most conveys the aforementioned elements... a real summary, created however from unreleased songs, of the career of the New York trio; perhaps for this reason less compact and experimental compared to other albums, but certainly more exemplary. Just the beginning of "Moby Octopus" is enough to get a taste of the greatness of Yo La Tengo... psychedelic tremors, hypnotic pace, and halfway through the song a minimalist piano comes in to outline dissonant scales on the piece:

Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo.