This Is The Last…

From Tiny Mix Tapes…

Since 1996, Yo La Tengo has been visiting the WFMU studios to whore themselves out for the station’s annual fundraising marathon. Not literally whore themselves out (although Hoboken can be pretty rough), but whore themselves out musically – that is, by playing any song that a caller who pledges money to the station wants to hear. They’ve made a few CDs of cover songs culled from these sessions over the years, and now they’ve culled covers from those CDs (we call this a double-cull) and put them on a brand new CD called Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics.

If you read the description on the Matador website or the note that Ira sent out to the Yo La e-mail list, you’d think the album was really embarrassingly awful and actually unpleasant to hear. The website calls the album “a Best-of, or Best-of-the-Worst, or Worst-of-the-Best, or … oh, what’s the use, it’s dreadful,” and Ira says that it’s “more fun than going to the dentist … barely.”

Anyway, if you want to find out whether the “70 excruciating minutes” of covers are as “excruciating” as Ira says, you can buy a copy of the album on the Matador website. There’s no official tracklist.
So, to sum up: it’s a bunch of covers played by Yo La Tengo — they might be good, they might be horrible.