Music: Melancholy Mayhem

The late Rock journalist Robert Palmer had this to say about Yo La Tengo in a 1986 live review: “Yo La Tengo is a Pop-Rock band in the tradition of Big Star and the mid-’60s Kinks. They didn’t seem very confident, and they haven’t yet found an identity that’s indisputably their own, something to help them stand out amid the current glut of guitar bands.”

After 17 years, nothing could be further from the truth.

Over the course of 11 full-length albums — including the just released Summer Sun — and numerous side projects and EPs, Yo La Tengo has established itself as one of the most unique, independent and adventurous artists in this or any other musical era.

The trio from Hoboken, N. J. —drummer/vocalist Georgia Hubley, guitarist/vocalist Ira Kaplan and bassist/vocalist James McNew — have diverse sonic interests ranging from hushed, acoustic-based melancholia to feedback-drenched, psychedelic guitar freak-outs and back again, sometimes within the same song. As self-confirmed music geeks — Kaplan was even a music scribe at one point — the band conjures a disparate range of influences into their eclectic grab-bag of skewed Pop soundscapes.

Formed in 1984 by the husband-and-wife team of Hubley and Kaplan, Yo La Tengo combined their shared admiration for Art Rock rebels like the Velvet Underground, Mission of Burma and Sonic Youth with more straightforward Rock acts like Neil Young and, yes, Big Star and The Kinks.

The band’s latest, Summer Sun, is Yo La Tengo at its melancholy best. Akin to 2000’s laid-back, Jazz-inflected And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, Summer Sun finds Kaplan exploring his endless repertoire of guitar tones/lines with triumphant understatement. At same time, the emotive power of Hubley’s once-staid singing voice has emerged as a definite Yo La Tengo asset.

The 10-plus minutes of “Let’s Be Still” is the album’s centerpiece, weaving a rolling piano line, flute, light drumming, lush vocal harmonizing, trumpet and warm, reverberating guitar into a gorgeous creation of hypnotic beauty.

Elsewhere, only the white-funk stylings of “Moonrock Mambo” and “Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo” break up the sonically muted yet affecting experience that is Summer Sun.

Speaking by phone from his Hoboken home, Kaplan distinctly remembers the aforementioned Palmer blurb, the first mention of the band by a major publication, The New York Times.

“It’s funny, I’m sure he hadn’t seen us before, but that was actually us at our most confident,” says Kaplan, laughing. “But we were a timid band at that time, without a doubt. I think we had gone out and bought some preposterous clothes (for the show); we were only supposed to play for 20 minutes, so we brought a kitchen timer with us and turned it on to make sure we didn’t play over time. In our mind we were being very — I don’t know if confident is the right word — but assertive.”

Needless to say, things have changed. After nearly 20 years as a band, 10 with McNew on board, it’s obvious Yo La Tengo’s creative freedom and inner stability has been an asset.

“I think it keeps getting better,” Kaplan says of the band’s personal dynamic. “I think the things that can get in the way sometimes, when you have concerns about the way things are going, are no longer a concern. I think we’ve ridden through enough things over the years that it’s provided perspective.”

Notorious for Kaplan’s noisy, guitar-based excursions (the glorious riff-fest of “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)” on 1995’s Electr-O-Pura remains one of this interviewer’s personal faves), the last two Yo La Tengo records have been surprisingly serene. Yet Kaplan, as usual, says they were organic, what’s-best-for-the-record decisions.

“There’s a few Rock songs that we recorded and then decided not to put on the final record (Summer Sun),” he says. “We were listening to possible sequences, and this is the one that seemed to jump out at us. So at that point we kinda made a certain after-the-fact decision to allow it to be (like And Then Nothing…) again. I think we could have very easily come up with a very different sounding record.”

Another facet of Yo La Tengo’s well-earned creative freedom is their longtime relationship with New York über-indie, Matador Records.

“I think in some ways you could describe them as a label and us as a band in similar ways,” says Kaplan of their almost synonymous relationship with the label. “They’re obviously out to be successful; they try to sell their records to as many people as they can. But you don’t ever feel they would sign just anybody because they thought they could sell records. They try to work with music they like and try to find a way to sell it. So I feel like it’s a really good blend of … I don’t know … art and commerce.”

Commerce aside — Eminem shifts more units in a month than the entirety of Yo La Tengo’s discography — this Hoboken trio has definitely got the art of making singular, creative records down to a science.

This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2003.