Happy Fall! Today’s Random Album of the Day is the Danelectro EP from Yo La Tengo. I’m a huge Yo La Tengo fan going back to 1990. Yo La Tengo is Indie Rock but they do wander into other genres and this one gets the Folktronica and Post-Rock tags too.
The bulk of this EP is chill, sweet melodies. This EP also does represent a bit of what I love about Yo La Tengo where it shifts into melodious weirdness. It sort of does this very gradually with peak weirdness hitting on the last song.
Still, overall not my favorite Yo La Tengo. It’s enjoyable but not my most favored of their stuff. For one it is all instrumental with lots of sampling which is not my favorite thing. I also like where they ebb and flow between chill and totally not chill. And this EP is mostly on the chill end of things – so I miss that bouncing around bit. Also less guitar and Ira’s guitar is just great.
Rating: 8.8
Favorite Track(s): “Danelectro 3” opens it up with melodious and sweet. And very chill. Followed by the even more chill “Danelectro 2”. We get a little sampling on “Danelectro 1 (Q-Unique remix)”. But remains chill. “Danelectro 3 (Kit Clayton remix)” gets a bit intense – in a good way. Still chill overall. Finally we get the weirdness on “Danelectro 2” which I most like.
Keep or Trash: Keep. Even if not my favorite Yo La Tengo – it remains to be Yo La Tengo and the completionist in me must have it.
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: