Yo La Tengo - "Sugarcube"

My major musical discovery this summer was Yo La Tengo. Yup, that band that's been around forever, which I was first exposed to on mixtapes back in the nineties. I didn't dislike them previously; it was worse than that. I wrote them off as being merely okay. But this summer something shifted in my mind as I listened to I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. I finally see the genius of Yo La Tengo's sonic ambidextrousness, the way they move through sheets of noise as comfortably as they do tender little ditties. They somehow make the loud and quiet, distorted and clean, tongue-in-cheek and sincere all fit together perfectly.

I don't know what my eureka moment was exactly, but it might have been when I was listening to "Sugarcube" on the Metro to work one day. Hearing Ira Kaplan singing that he was trying to be more assured, less uptight, and more aware over the swirl of gloriously noisy pop really hit home. Those are the things I'm trying to do. Yo La Tengo makes it clear that it's never too late to try to be a better a person, to fall in love with an old band, to see beyond what you thought you knew. To squeeze a drop of blood from a sugarcube.

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