Gig Of The Week – Yo La Tengo @ Queen Elizabeth Hall
The Ornette Coleman curated Meltdown festival dominates the London gig listings this week, with my pick being an appearance from Yo La Tengo tonight at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Not only are the New Jersey trio rarely over here (and as an aside – where are the Condo Fucks appearances this side of the pond, hey?) but for the festival they are showing up in ‘Freewheeling’ mode. Moving away from the traditional setlisted gig this is an opportunity for fans to holler at the band – conversations, requests I guess anything goes! One of my biggest gig regrets is that I didn’t catch the band whilst over in NYC in December ‘08 during their residency at Maxwells on their home patch, and alas I’m not able to make good that fact tonight. Tickets are long gone, but Scarlet Mist and Ebay are your friends.
Yo La Tengo – Sometimes I Don’t Get You
Read on for the rest of the week’s recommendations…
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December 2007 – We’d been planning a trip to New York for years and years and the famous record shops were a big draw for me. New York artists are responsible for a huge proportion of my record collection – I hoped to stock up on several back catalogues whilst there, taking advantage of the then superb exchange rates… Well the city and it’s shops didn’t let me down! Greenwich Village was obviously the first and best call, with at least three along Bleecker Street alone. Worth a mention were the staff at Bleecker Street Records who valiantly tried to help us get tickets to see Yo La Tengo over in Hoboken that night, alas in vain.
Streets ahead though was Rebel Rebel Records. Take a gander at the picture above – total chaos. I’d have quite happily spent hours browsing away in here, but we had sights to see and galleries to muse through. The chap poking out through the piles littering the counter quite happily chatted away to me about the London scene, how Burial records were difficult to get hold of and how good it was for us Brits shopping in the Big Apple. The kind of interaction you’d expect from your own local record shop, only I was thousands of miles away. I turned away to rummage through a few likely looking boxes, randomly picking the ones that might hold a gem…
Star Find: In the end I found pretty much exactly what I wanted, the latest Blonde Redhead LP, 23. A New York record by a New York band, and one of the very finest albums of 2007.
Blonde Redhead – 23
Photo: ChrisB
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