The latest album to get a deluxe vinyl reissue as part of Matador’s Revisionist History series is Yo La Tengo’s Electr-o-pura, which is 25 years old on May 2.
The album has been pressed on to double vinyl for the first time and is available to order from here. The reissue also comes with an essay from fellow Matador artist Lucy Dacus who amazingly was born on May 2, 1995 – the day that Electr-o-pura came out.
“Fourteen years later, I started high school and made a new friend who wore a leather jacket and boots, who expressed confident opinions about music that I had never heard,” she writes. “One day my friend brought me a stack of CDs, all Yo La Tengo, and told me to take them home, listen to them, burn them, and return them. I did what I was told. I liked those records from the start, and more with every listen.”
“‘Tom Courtenay’ was the first Yo La Tengo song I learned on guitar. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew who Julie Christie was and loved the line, ‘As the music swells somehow stronger from adversity / our hero finds his inner peace.’ I didn’t know what the needle had to do with anything, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was like any good poem, leaving space for me, between images.”
Watch Lucy Dacus’s cover of “Tom Courtenay” below: