Today’s Random Album of the Day is Summer Sun from Yo La Tengo. I have always thought of Yo La Tengo as straight up Indie Rock but Rate Your Music does list all of these genres which all make some sense: Indie Rock, Noise Pop, Indie Pop, Dream Pop, Post-Rock, and Ambient Pop.
This band is so prolific that I have over 20 of their albums. I’ve been a huge fan since May I Sing With Me which I used to play on my radio show in college. Yet I have not listened to Summer Sun a lot. I think it just fell through the cracks. So I’m stoked it came up today!
I’ve always loved Yo La Tengo’s mix of softness with great noisy guitar solos and often times keyboard droning. Their shows are great. Their albums are great. They are fantastic to me and Summer Sun is a good album. It’s a good but not great album I feel. Totally enjoyable which is what matters. It’s perhaps a bit too chill, but also totally chill and that’s good.
Rating: 9.6
Favorite Track(s): “Little Eyes” is classic Yo La Tengo. Love it. “Today is the Day” is great. Love it. “Tiny Birds” is excellent. Overall consistently good music.
Keep or Trash: Keep. It’s Yo La Tengo!
Background
Every day, or nearly every day anyhow, I will randomly select an album from my collection of digital music, listen to it, and share it here. – Jayne
My wife and I are board gamers and we gamify nearly everything in life. This includes our music listening. We use a dice catapult to roll dice and then use the dice results to pick our vinyl listens. So why not do something similar for the blog?
I have made the randomizer table I use for picking the album of the day available! What? It’s a simple table but uses some weird dice. If you are not familiar, if you say D30 that means a 30 sided die. These are the dice the randomizer table uses: D30, D4, D8, D10, D12, D14, and D20. The D14 and D30 are unique but you can buy cheap packs of dice with those in them off the internet.
The basic steps are to 1) roll the D30. That picks the starting letter or if it’s a number. 2) Then use the chart roll the die associated with the first letter to pick the second letter. If you get “Other” that means numbers or some other weird character. If none of those exist re-roll. 3) Once you have the second letter you can use that to roll for a third letter if needed. 4) That should get you down to a few artists and from there you pick dice based on the number of artists. 5) finally for the artist selected you roll a die for the number of albums listed. Then you have your Random Album to listen to….
Download the Random Album Selector Table here: