Customer Reviews

Painful

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My Buddy Peter teases me about my obsession with this band. It's Okay, it's a healthy obsession and this was the album that started it for me! Although not as accessible as there '97 release I Can hear The Heart beating As One it cetainly has the power to pull you in and not let you go......nor do you want it to let you go.

It was 1995 or 96 and Yo La (as my buddy calls them) was on a Matador Records tour headlining for Pavement and Silkworm, two of my favorite bands at the time. That day I asked around "Who is this Yo La Tengo?" I didn't find out much so the next day I went out and bought Painful. I had the day off and decided to get high and run a few errands. It was a beautiful day in Atlanta so I popped in my new CD, rolled the windows down, opened the sunroof and took the backroads everywhere I went that day. From the dreamy organ of the opening track Big Day Coming to the distorted epic seven minute long emotional crescendo of the final track I Heard You Looking I knew I had discovered something unique, something imaginative, something perfectly balanced. I knew that day it was the beginning of a life long love affair. Like a drug, it was something I had been looking for all my (musically obsessed) life yet constantly kept coming up short. Painful floats and soares to exalting heights in and out of dreamy melodies. Stylistically placed organ interludes, rolling drums, Bass lines and Softly spoken guitars build up emotinal energy as Georgia Hubley's oohs and aahs hang in the distance. Am I dreaming or am I really this satisfied by this music?

I have to laugh at myself and include this quote I came across while reading a review on Pitchfork of Yo La's 1997 release I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One "Yo La Tengo is still the greatest band in the universe! Enough said".

-Jason Josephes, May, 1997

Pitchfork gave that album a rating of 9.7 out of 10!

This album has some absolutely gorgeous melodies and is stylistically almost shoegazer, with its reliance on feedback and ethereal walls of sound. While somewhat inconsistent it has a good number of beautiful songs that take me back to my early college days when i was discovering excellent new bands all the time. Two standout songs are Nowhere Near and Sudden Organ. Nowhere Near can be listened to as a sample and perfectly captures the fuzzy, dreamy, distortion-laden beauty of the album. Highly recommended. If you listen to this and like it you should also check out Boo Radley's "Everythings Alright Forever".

Boy, do I like this CD. For me, this is still the best record YLT have ever made.

It was back in 1993, and they were setting out the path between ethereal, soft sound and hardcore noise drones and somehow they got it right. Witness the two versions of "Big Day Coming" - they point you all the way from their earlier efforts to "And Then Nothing...".

Despite the fact that the musical mood varies more than on any of their other records, this is perhaps their most cohesive, most cleverly planned production. "From a Motel 6" and "Sudden Organ" are as timeless as "A Worrying Thing" and "I Was the Fool Beside You for Too Long". Every single song here is great. It's the one record that I wish wouldn't end.

Buy buy buy buy.

As I've mentioned before, Electr-O-Pura is my favorite record by one of my favorite bands, but Painful comes very close. Like Pura, Painful is tight and cohesive, not padded and overlong (as some other YLT records are), and it flows seamlessly from one high point to the next. Standouts include the unspeakably gorgeous instrumental closer "I Heard You Looking" (I swear, no band knows how to finish up an album like YLT), the edgy swirling "Sudden Organ", and Georgia Hubley's lovely miss-you song "Nowhere Near." Unlike YLT's later work, Painful is quiet without dissolving into a formless sludge, while still retaining its noisy edge. Buy this one--the sounds you will hear coming from your stereo are the sounds of one of America's greatest rock bands hitting their stride. I've been listening to this one for ten years now and still fall in love every time I hear it.

after getting their kinks out (no pun intended) with may i sing with me, yo la tengo put forth their most cohesive album.

the songs on 'painful' *belong* together, and nowhere else. the band comes together for their first certifiably great album

often cited as ylt's marquee moment, they let everything out of the bag: there's 'from a motel six' (often known to induce tourette's syndrome during concerts, the crowd jostling and swaying in unison to ylt's personalized brand of uptempo indie rock,) 'nowhere near' (ylt's heartwarming, beautiful late night ballad) ira's organ grinding ('sudden organ') and ylt's first instrumental epic ('i heard you looking')

this where the going got great. buy it, know it, love it!

This is a masterpiece--I think it's far and away the best rock album of the 1990s. It just gets better with repeated listens. From the ethereal drone of "Big Day Coming" to the orgiastic fuzz of "Sudden Organ" to a gorgeous cover of "The Whole of the Law", this is Yo La Tengo's finest hour, and that's coming from a fan who believes everything this band touches turns to gold. Once you own this album, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. If for some reason you're only able to buy one YLT album, buy this one.

I think I'm addicted to this album. This is where Yo La Tengo really started getting into sonic exploration, while remaining true to their rootsy, pop-rock origins. Washes of dreamy organ alternate with jagged, reverb-heavy guitars and ringing feedback, creating an organic, heterogenous body of sorts that flows and ebbs with inscrutable rhythms. Some might find it all a bit too droney, but I love the effect. "From A Motel 6" and "Double Dare" offer hooks galore, and who can ignore the untouchable purity of "Nowhere Near"?

Their musical sensibilities were really starting to prove uniquely fluid and intuitive, as the two completely different versions of "Big Day Coming" point to. The first, the album opener, is built around a gentle repeated organ motif, and slides and throbs gently like waking up slowly on a Saturday morning. The other version has what sounds like very heavily reverb'd guitar, harsh and unforgiving, but I think it's actually organ. That one, while not particularly pleasant in and of itself, is interesting in being a totally different take on the same song. It all ends with an awesome jammy instrumental, "I Heard You Looking," which gradually builds and overflows upon itself, until towards the end the guitar part devolves into total beautiful chaos at the climax before returning to form. Nobody knows how to pull off a heart-pounding, climactic album-closer like Yo La Tengo. This album I just keep coming back to for more.

I heard alot about this band and randomly just picked up their cd. I enjoy this cd the most out of all the others. They are very subtle but extremely emotional. The songs get better everytime you listen to it. Even though sometimes you can't hear what they are saying, but the song on the whole all fits together. its not only the lyrics, but the music that perfectly matches.

I enjoy "big day coming", "nowhere near" and "i heard you looking" these songs seem to be the perfect backdrops for those special moments in your life....If you are interested in Yo La Tengo, i recommend this album first.

Painful is without a doubt, YLT's best album to date. From the meditative, ethereal "Big Day Coming", which is opening this album, to the raw, fuzz-noised reprise of the same song towards the end, this record shines with its assortment of musical originality (although it *is* somewhat reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine is some instances) and rich melodic and vocal textures. This is a record that starts great on first listening to it and gets better every time you listen again. A must-have, strongly recommended.

Painful is actually a quietly brooding melodrama. Despite it's dreamy sound, Yo La Tengo's music is anything but apathetic or detached: it is drenched in reverb that sounds like pathos, distortion that sounds like anger, vocal harmonies that sound like love. In essence, Yo La Tengo found the perfect formula to paint love songs and heartbrake songs behind impressionistic soundscapes that only the skillful instrumentation of the band members could convey. Painful is probably the first complete Yo La Tengo album in this vein, and surely the first great Yo La Tengo album. The eclecticism is present - but not jarring - the compositions piece together like a ride on gently, swelling waves.

I must admit, almost everything you see in "Painful" can be found to an ever greater measure on "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As one". This later album, made in 1997, is Yo La Tengo's masterpiece. And while it doesn't radically shift the aesthetic established on "Painful", it is entirely essential - while Painful is by no means made obsolete.

To complete the YLT experience, also buy "I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One" and "And Then Nothing turned Itself Inside Out"

Rating: 9.3/10