I just went back and found my "Top Ten Albums of 1997" list. It was a good list, I think. It included artists like Katell Keineg, Tuatara, Tsunami, and Ben Folds Five. Number One was Radiohead's "OK Computer." Number Ten was by Yo La Tengo, a band whose current-at-the-time album I had taped from my college radio station's CD library. At the time I made the list, I had listened to the tape about seven times, and was very impressed with it, and in a year packed with great releases, I deemed it the tenth best.

Looking back at the Top Ten list for that year, I can see only one true candidate for the Number One position: Yo La Tengo's "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One."

I feel right now about the two-year-old "I Can Hear. . ." the way I felt the first time I heard Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation" back in 1988. It rips me to shreds.

There is no noise so beautiful as the steam-escaping guitar feedback of "Deeper Into Movies," the loudness of it, the crash of it into Georgia Hubley's melancholy-blasé, Astrud Gilberto-via-Karen Carpenter coy purr from behind her studied "After Hours" thump-thump of the following track, "Shadows." "Stockholm Syndrome," next up, is the would-be McCartney tune with the would-be Tom Verlaine guitar solo. And then, the halfway point, the emphasis track, the beautiful, urban, I'm-on-a-hunt-I'm-after-you swells and hushes and spells and crushes of "Autumn Sweater" - its discordant soap-opera organ, its Simple Minds teen beat, its "me with nothin' to say/you in your autumn sweater."

"I Can Hear. . ." is indeed urban, even though its creators live on the outskirts of New York Town, in a little corner of the world called Hoboken, NJ. The cosmopolitanism of their music doesn't add up to the regular city music, like dance, or punk, or jazz. Remember "Harlem Nocturne"? The creepy, slow percussiveness of it? Footsteps brushing down on the ground, that you can hear louder than you want to, as you're walking home in those graveyard hours from whatever haunt you haunt. "I Can Hear. . ." is a car turning cautiously onto Times Square as the last of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd tiptoes home, as the homeless park themselves outside of the Howard Johnson's, as the lights on the Nissin Cup O' Noodles sign get crisper and brighter with the contrast of black night behind them.

It's marvelous, this album, the way it builds, the way it decrescendos into three-minute islands of yesteryore pop calm, and throws a cocky, delinquent punch (their cover of The Beach Boys' "Little Honda"), and raves along like some kinda Lou Reed at a tempo that seems faster than it is, filling up every bit of you, every fingernail and what have you, with loud, raw, gracefully raucous guitar vibrato courtesy of Mr. Ira Kaplan.

And back again, into tom-tom tranquility, with Georgia H. taking the vox, but soon Ira steals the show and does the unspeakable with his guitar - never quite on key, always more feedback than actual notes, but they're high notes, and they're fast, but not guitar-whiz fast, and not guitar-whiz great, but still perfect. I won't give away the ending, though. I'll let you take that trip by your lonesome, and it's a good trip to take. I'll let you hear for yourself, and return to it, and return and return. I'll give you enough time before the end of the year so you can include this at the tippy-top of whatever best-of lists you're gonna compile, and you will compile them; trust me. "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One" is going into my Top Five Albums of the 1990s. Possibly the Top Two. I'm still not sure what I'd consider Number One.

I'm sure, though, that whatever I may pick by this December will change as soon as February rolls around (even though Yo La Tengo will be the best-of-something, damn it), and you can bet your bippy I'll be there to write about it when it does.

If you're too poor to buy "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One," you can listen to it right here, in its entirety:

http://www.sba.muohio.edu/ylt/latest.html