Yo La Tengo - May I Sing with Me
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Yo La TengoEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1992-02-28
Music Label: Alias Records
Soundtracks:
- Detouring America With Horns
- Upside-Down
- Mushroom Cloud Of Hiss
- Swing For Life
- Five-Cornered Drone (Crispy Duck)
- Some Kinda Fatigue
- Always Something
- 86-Second Blowout
- Out The Window
- Sleeping Pill
- Satellite
Free Music Notes for May I Sing with Me
Free Music Review: Consistently satisfying, but largely lacking in excellence.
Hit: 3 Stars
On their early records, Yo La Tengo was a band still trying to find itself in many ways, and 1992's "May I Sing With Me" was pretty much the point where they seemed to have arrived, reconciling all the elements of their sound-- folk, trance, noise and straight up rock and roll into a stew that, while it somewhat lacks the immediacy of their earlier records and excellence of what would be soon to come from the band, it was the first album they produced that felt consistent start to finish, and it was the first one that grappled with the band's many facets effectively.
Yo La Tengo has been known for noise-based rock of the type the Velvet Underground pioneered, and certainly "May I Sing With Me" has quite a bit of that in feedback drenched numbers like the extended "Mushroom Cloud of Hiss" and "Five-Cornered Drone", but they're also a band with a melodic side, and this comes out too in riff-based rockers like the utterly superb "Upside-Down" and "Some Kinda Fatigue". Make no mistake though, this isn't a loud record only, with the band finding themselves a unique brand of new waveish pop in the ambient-hinting "Always Something" and opener "Detouring America With Horns". And certainly it's this diversity that makes the record intriguing.
Having offered heaps of praise, one thing I can safely say about "May I Sing With Me" is it's not an album I find myself reaching for much-- yeah, "Upside-Down" is fantastic and there's a lot of good material on here, but there's not a lot of fantastic material. It's an album that avoids extremes of greatness by maintaining a sort of effectiveness throughout. It's a rebirth of sorts for them though, they've found their sound and they'd use it to great effect in the near future. Curiously, the album could have been made better by pulling in some b-sides from the single for Upside-Down EP (5 tracks), but those were covers and this was a record of originals. Together, the two work together better, but Yo La Tengo would produce better material shortly (this record's followup Painful, for example).
May I Sing with Me Poster
May I Sing with Me is the oft-overlooked pivotal album in the Yo La Tengo discography: the first to be made with the lineup of husband-and-wife team Ira Kaplan (guitar, vocals) and Georgia Hubley (drums) with bassist James McNew; the first on which Kaplan emerges as a first-class guitarist; the first on which the band's interest in drone-pop combines with its rootsy-folky base; and the first on which they record a song over nine minutes long (two of 'em, in fact, and it's not a bad thing). The next three albums--Painful, Electr-o-pura, and I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One--all go further into sonic experimentation, with increasingly rewarding results, but on May I it's the dichotomy of raw power and mellow travelogues that infuses the songs. On "Mushroom Cloud of Hiss," Kaplan screams as his guitar wails like nothing this side of the MC5, but "Satellite" finds his guitar caressing Hubley's vocals. "Some Kinda Fatigue" marries the Velvet Underground to Jason & the Scorchers, while "Always Something" drops the latter. --Randy SilverAlternative Rock Music CDs
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