Electr-O-Pura

Spin (12/95, p.62) - Ranked #11 on Spin's list of the `20 Best Albums Of '95.' Spin (6/95, p.100) - 9 - Near Perfect - "...Yo La Tengo...help the literal-minded listener to focus on texture and groove, the splatter of Ira Kaplan's guitar against the pull and flow of Georgia Hubley's drums....ELECTR-O-PURA juxtaposes the intimacies of culture..." Q (7/95, p.133) - 3 Stars - Good - "...an album of uneasy contrasts and occasional brilliance which remains strangely remote and difficult to grasp." Alternative Press (8/95, p.103) - "...alternate[s] between heavy art-school distortion fuzz and laid-back Sunday afternoon drizzle. They do both so well that it doesn't really matter which you prefer; if you're willing, either will sweep you up and take you someplace nice....ELECTR-O-PURA is filled with fine songs and beautiful sounds. It's an album worth every second you listen to it." Option (9-10/95, p.146) - "...The balance of ELECTR-O-PURA is consistently outstanding, bridging the gap between tenacious and gutsy, with Yo La Tengo's modestly intuitive singing and facile playing..." Melody Maker (4/22/95, p.35) - Recommended - "...the band's seventh collection of wayward pop masterpieces....ELECTR-O-PURA deliberately trawls through the shadier corners of the guitar multiverse, opting without fail for the moments where layers of fuzz create a black hole of sound..." Village Voice (2/20/96) - Ranked #9 in Village Voice's 1995 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll.

After the noisy but dream-like drift of Painful, Electr-O-Pura found Yo La Tengo in livelier and more outwardly enthusiastic form; while they had hardly abandoned their more subdued and contemplative side, as evidenced by the lovely "The Hour Grows Late" and "Pablo and Andrea," they seemed eager to once again explore the grittier textures they'd unearthed on President Yo La Tengo and May I Sing With Me with tunes like the gleefully manic "False Ending" and the bizarre horn-blasted "Attack on Love." Yo La Tengo also served up one of the most perfectly realized pop tunes in their repertoire with "Tom Courtenay" (which not only name checks the Beatles, but boasts a tune the Fab Four would have been happy to come up with themselves), and revisited the concept of the noisy groove jam (which they pioneered on "The Evil That Men Do (Pablo's Version)") with the acetone-powered "False Alarm" and the joyous "Blue Line Swinger." Throughout, Ira Kaplan's simple but forceful guitar lines, Georgia Hubley's steady, subtly inventive drumming, and James McNew's solid, supportive bass add up to a group that prizes intelligence and imagination over flash, and makes it work over and over. Few bands have consistently better ideas than Yo La Tengo, and they make 14 of them work like a charm on Electr-O-Pura. (By the way, those incongruous comments about the songs were lifted from an obscure book on the Blues Project, and don't trust those timings on the back cover -- they're deliberately inaccurate.) ~ Mark Deming