Yo La Tengo Night One

(pictures will be up wednesday afternoon)
what i'm listening to right now: Incinerate by Sonic Youth

Loudest. Show. Ever. Yo La Tengo melted my face off. It was amazing, transcendent, perfect, much more than I ever wanted it to be. More than I knew it could be.
Portastatic opened. Which I was trepedatious about at best. In the past two times I've seen them, they were plodding and ponderous. Last night, they played up to their potential. Mac was on fire, writhing around with the guitar, throwing his all into each song. That honestly could have been enough, just going to a Portastatic show that didn't suck.

Not wasting any time, Yo La Tengo got on stage fairly quickly and just dived right into it. They started with their new instrumental, "El Es Gay" and went right into the hot fire that is "Pass The Hatchet, I'm Goodkind" for a good twelve minutes after that. For the rest of the night, they effortlessly switched between massive feedback attacks, gentle ballads, the loudest punk song ever, actually, the loudest song ever. In the middle of the show they did this hardcore punk take on a fifties song that I couldn't recognize, and I'm pretty sure Ira just turned up every knob attached to his guitar and just went crazy, it was like fax machines playing bumper cars inside your head. It was ungodly and yet, it renewed my faith in the future of mankind. After that they stretched out on "Blue Line Swinger" and a complete redo of "Swing For Life" (I could be wrong about that, it might have been something else, but it sounded like the melody from "Swing For Life"). In the middle of "Swing For Life, as Ira was completely abusing his guitar, tossing it in the air, behind his back, stabbing it's neck into the ground, he killed the guitar, and had to get another one to continue through the rest of the song. They ended the show with two encores, the first full of covers "Speeding Motorcycle", "Picture Book", and "Luci Baines". The second encore, was "Our Way To Fall" and "Green Arrow". They did "Our Way To Fall" perfectly, a perfect ending song, which Ira pointed out, saying "If you're anything like us and have read 'How To Be An Entertainer', you know that should have been our last song... But it's cold outside, and you don't want to go back out there right now, so we're gonna end with an instrumental that's a real downer." They played the beautiful "Green Arrow" and left the stage. My ears rang for the rest of the night. Tonight The Rosebuds open, the first time they've played out in maybe six months in the area. Their new album is coming out in April, it should be great.