YO LA TENGO
Yo La Tengo (often abbreviated as YLT) is an American indie rock band formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Despite achieving limited mainstream success, Yo La Tengo has been called "the quintessential critics' band" and maintains a strong cult following. Though they mostly play original material, Yo La Tengo is renowned for its encyclopedic repertoire of cover songs both in live performance and on record. (More from Wikipedia)
If anything, the proliferation of rock bands and new rock genres and subgenres has made the problem worse (if that is the right word). When the Sound Shop record store at our local Edgewater Mall went out of business several years ago, I went through the CD’s that were left over a week or so before they closed for good. They had been pretty well picked over, and nearly all of them did not ring even a little bell. I did pick up a few records, among them an anthology album by the Stone Roses and a get-out-the-vote collaboration by Chris Stamey and Yo La Tengo called V.O.T.E. (it has the same cover as Stamey’s album that came out at about the same time called A Question of Temperature). I knew Chris Stamey as a co-founder of the dB's, while the store clerk knew the alternative rock band Yo La Tengo that he was playing with and also knew how good that particular record was.
(December 2015)
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Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.
December 2015 – 1990’s pop/punk band AMANDA JONES; Story of the Month on the early American singles by the Beatles; also, Rochelle Harper, Lisa Loeb, 3 Doors Down, Level with the Ground, Chris Stamey with Yo La Tengo, Meri Wilson, Bobby Brown, the Cruzados / the Plugz, Terence Trent d’Arby, An Emotional Fish, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Hunters & Collectors, Looters, Shakespear’s Sister, Robert Tepper, Y Kant Tori Read / Tori Amos, Ugly Kid Joe, Paul Young, the Rolling Stones, Mandy Brix, the Joneses.
(Year 7 Review)
