Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Hand in Hand: Yo La Tengo's "Popular Songs"

I am curious to hear a song called "Hippies and a Oujia Board," quite honestly.


Wrote this one for The Observer a few weeks ago, only getting around to posting it now. I'll try and be better about this folks, if anyone's reading.


Anyway, this album... remember that post I did a while back about albums that shaped my life? Well, add this one to the mix. No doubts about that at all. Here we go:


Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, who make up two-thirds of legendary indie stalwarts Yo La Tengo, are married. This is an important fact to have in mind when listening to their music, as so much of it sounds like the work of two people, long married and still deeply in love. The hushed, nuanced vocals, the subtle, yet passionate performances and the endearing lyrics are all indicative of their marital status and essential components of Yo La Tengo’s sound. Still, with a lengthy catalog boasting such heartwarming indie staples as “Autumn Sweater,” “Sugarcube” and “Our Way to Fall,” with Popular Songs, Yo La Tengo may have released their most overtly romantic album yet, and in addition to (or perhaps because of) this, it is also one of their best.

Immediately, the band makes this romantic disposition clear with “Here to Fall,” a career highlight that pits Kaplan’s vow to nosedive into devotion against all odds over an unusually seductive rhythm and string punctuations and flourishes straight out of a Paul Buckmaster arrangement. Unashamedly bombastic, the song helps push the band into new sonic territory while still looking backwards to the band’s beloved 1960’s for inspiration. Similarly retroactive is “If It’s True,” which bases its opening lick around that of the Four Tops’ Motown classic “I Can’t Help Myself” and builds an infectious new pop song from there. The group also drags the Farfisa organ out of the garage for the catchy retro groove of “Periodically Triple or Double.”

Still, Yo La Tengo have never been the sort of band to exclusively look backward (they cheerfully let off a lot of steam while masquerading earlier this year as the Condo Fucks on the sloppy, yet infectious cover album, Fuckbook) and the rest of the album hosts several tracks archetypal of their own unique style that rank with their best work. “Nothing to Hide,” in particular, is the most perfect slab of fuzzy power pop Yo La Tengo have released since 1997’s “Sugarcube.” Perhaps most representative of the band’s true sound is “Avalon or Someone Very Similar,” a hazy, jangly Hubley-lead track that sounds like an exceptional outtake from 2000’s delightfully low-key And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Closing the album, “And the Glitter is Gone” envelops listeners in swirls of feedback and holds tight for nearly sixteen minutes, continuing a tradition of lengthy, trancelike tracks that have emerged on many of the band’s albums.

Still, it is in the three tracks which precede that closing behemoth where Yo La Tengo present some of the most emotionally resonant, breathtaking and ethereal work of their career. “All My Secrets” boasts one of the album’s most gorgeous and captivating melodies, over which Kaplan meditates about honesty and love as Hubley harmonizes in the background. The warmth generated by the following track, “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven” is nearly unparalleled in popular music. Layers and layers of sound are added over the course of the song’s ten minutes, and the subdued yet omnipresent chorus echoes repeatedly, “We’ll walk hand in hand.” With a discography full of meditative moments, few come close to matching the serenity of “The Fireside,” an exercise in post-rock minimalism without all the pretention the genre is burdened with. Concluding with the sentiment, “Sometime/Please think of me,” these three songs culminate Yo La Tengo’s vast exploration of beauty and romance in their music and distinguish themselves as clear highlights on an album full of them.

Popular Songs finds Yo La Tengo at the top of a game they mastered years ago, continuing to refine their unique mix of subtlety and grandiosity, of past and present and of passion and detachment. So long as the chemistry between Kaplan and Hubley never dies out, listeners can expect the group to continue to refine this sound for years to come, and judging by the devotion that lies inherently behind this record alone, it seems like they’ll be together for a long, long time.


And hey hey! There are a bunch of wacky promo clips for these tunez. And the "Nothing to Hide" one features Times New Viking, a band I'm not even all that crazy about!





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