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1994 marked a number of huge world events ; OJ Simpson emerged from football retirement to claim the headlines in a most unfortunate manner. John Starks missed somewhere in the range of 300 shots en route to the Houston Rockets defeating the New York Knicks in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. CIA officer Aldrich Ames was charged with spying for the Russians, and figure skating’s Tonya Harding put her own special spin on the phrase “lead pipe cinch”. Still, all of the above incidents are mostly forgotten in history, completely overshadowed by the prior year’s release of Yo La Tengo‘s first album for the Matador label, ‘Painful’, a record Spin’s Rob Sheffield called, “the album that keeps every promise Yo La Tengo ever made, full of ravishing, wraithlink melodies around scruffy guitars that clang around your head like sneakers in the dryer…when a bunch of weird sounds add up to a masterpiece as casually majestic as Painful, well, ‘genius’ isn’t even the word, is it?”

1. yolatengo.com