Yo La Tengo
The music on the seventh album from this Hoboken, N.J., band, is typically pensive and tautly constructed, producing the kind of conflicted pleasure one associates with caffeine jitters. The music is spare and simple, but the sound is thickened by a burr of feedback applied with such care it borders on the artful. Ira Kaplan and wife Georgia Hubley split the vocals: Both are recessive and thin, moving between sadness and bruised resentment as they deliver abstruse lyrics. As you try to follow Kaplan's words in "The Ballad of Red Buckets" ("It'll surely come...here it comes again"), it's hard to say whether the song is rich with promise or sick with dread. Or both. Electr-O-Pura is one of their best albums, either way. (Matador)
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