Thursday, May 08, 2003

NUCLEAR WAR

Well, not really, but Yo La Tengo opened up last night with barking mad Sun Ra's "Nuclear War" at last night's Bush gig. A bit of a departure for the Hoboken trio, but by all accounts, the group have "discovered" jazz in tha last year. That follows their other departure when they toured with sonic interpretations of naturalist shorts of French filmaker, Jean Painleve - now on CD. "Nuclear War" morphed into the more familiar territory of "Deeper into Movies" from 1999's "I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One".

YLT's gig at Fletcher's in Baltimore a few years back ranks in my top five all-time concerts. Last night was as to be expected: a good solid enjoyable night of fragile tunes and feedback induced wails from Ira's guitar. As Ira said at the beginning, "we've got a nice little record out called 'Summer Sun'". As has been said elsewhere "Summer Sun" is a CD of two halfs - one part classic indie another part jazz influenced experimentalism. It was the former that predominated on stage, but that cool dude stuff was never far from the surface. Towards the end the band put down a cracking version of "Blue Line Swinger" a edgy, swingy three chord thump and in the encore the re-mixed influenced arrangement of "Autumn Sweater".

The £20 cab ride to get home was worth it.

:: Posted by pete @ 18:06