How I Like Yo La Tengo: The Albums, pt. 1
My handy dandy profoundly subjective numerical rating scheme is decoded here.
Ride The Tiger (1986) 5
New Wave Hot Dogs (1987) 8
President Yo La Tengo (1989) 8
Fakebook (1990) 9
May I Sing With Me (1991) 7
Painful (1993) 8
Electr-O-Pura (1995) 9
Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan & Georgia Hubley are to Hoboken what Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore & Kim Gordon were to Manhattan: a romantic ideal of rock bohemianism. Both couples represented the dream of a shared life full of cool scenes, cool friends, cool shows and cool sounds, one less glamorous but more prepared for the inescapability of age and domesticity. Rather than help punk break into the mainstream, aspiring to cultural transgression, only to realize they were too old to enjoy the act, Yo La Tengo made aging hipsterdom their thing, achieving their commercial peak as Ira turned 40, two albums after the closest they came to a major label release. That 1997 breakthrough album (which I'll get to next time!) ends not just with a Skeeter Davis cover, but with one named “My Little Corner Of The World.” The subject of the first single, now a notorious Spotify algorithm staple? “You in your autumn sweater.” "Dirty Boots" this was not! While I’m not cluelessly parasocial enough to claim this why Yo La Tengo wound up surviving Sonic Youth (marriages and bands end in every city for all kind of reasons), their explicit mission to create a little corner of the world and keep it fresh & flourishing is a big reason they inspire such parasocial affection in fans normally above that kind of thing (I wish I could find the comments box where Robert Christgau said while he was sad about the Moore/Gordon split, it's a Kaplan/Hubley one that would truly break his heart).
Aging hipsterdom was something Yo La Tengo couldn’t avoid anyway; Ira Kaplan was almost 30 when he went from indie rock critic/show promoter to indie rock frontman. Their debut album Ride The Tiger shows a group with excellent taste in sidemen (Dave Schramm on guitar!), producers (Mission Of Burma bassist Clint Conley!) and cover material (The Kinks! Love! Pete Seeger!). Unfortunately, their singing and songwriting quickly becomes an issue. Ironically, the self-produced & Schram-less New Wave Hot Dogs is a huge improvement - denying themselves such crutches forced them to come up with some small-scale virtues of their own. It’s also harder to fuck up covering a then-unreleased Velvet Underground demo than the classic centerpiece of Village Green Preservation Society. I'm tempted to say Hot Dogs benefits from the knowledge of what the singer & drummer would accomplish later, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Numero Group could sell it as a lost treasure of record-collector jangle rock (one song lists America singles!) if the band had broken up before the third edition of the Trouser Press Album Guide. How do the crate-diggers rank Dumptruck today?
The creative restlessness of the band becomes clear with President Yo La Tengo, offering only 7 songs in just under the time it took New Wave Hot Dogs to deploy 12. “Barnaby, Hardly Working” - a cryptic, tragic narrative about an “an actor’s actor” over a shrieking guitar loop, organ and heavy groove would be a classic for New Order. And this wasn’t a band anyone planned on comparing to New Order. It’s so startling an opener you could miss how effectively “Drug Test” encapsulates and trumps the record nerd anomie of New Wave Hot Dogs. While what follows is a bit scattershot - surf instrumental, noise-rock cover, noise-rock exercise, folk-rock exercise and folk-rock cover - the exercises are effective and the covers - including a number from Nashville Skyline! - are a delight. This is when the critics first went from approving to ecstatic.
Then came their first sudden left turn, with the brief return of Schramm and the latest bassist (President had two!) playing a stand-up double. Kaplan has said the covers-heavy Fakebook isn’t a “music critic’s” album but a “music fan’s” album, as a critic would never cover Cat Stevens in 1990. I’d say he’s half right: if critics were going to cover Cat, they’d probably do a song that was a bigger hit for the Tremeloes, like Ira & company did. And only fans who could write liner notes would stick it in between numbers by NRBQ, John Cale, Daniel Johnston, Peter Stampfel, The Scene Is Now and Yo La Tengo (“Barnaby, Hardly Working” and “Did I Tell You” from New Wave Hot Dogs get overhauled). This time Schramm’s gorgeous lead-work is rewarding accompaniment rather than a saving grace, and drummer Georgia Hubley belatedly makes her presence known, revealing her sweet but subtly disaffected, girlish around the edges voice on multiple leads and duetting on “The Summer,” their first crack at being the Carter-Cash of college radio. Kaplan’s liner-notes, full of details about where to find the originals, serve as a snapshot of when music nerds didn’t have Wikipedia for that. Where an “unplugged” release is filler for most bands, Fakebook is the shining statement of Yo La Tengo’s initial phase: a "music fan's" band who could improve on the content of their mixtapes, even without feedback.
Not that they were done with feedback. Phase two (not that anyone knew latest bassist James McNew - or the band! - would still be around 30 years later) starts with May I Sing With Me, a recapitulation of established strengths highlighted by a couple all-time peaks. Or rather, all-time shrieks. If you have ten Yo La Tengo albums, but have never heard “Mushroom Cloud Of Hiss,” you still won’t be prepared for the sound Ira makes a little over 3 minutes into the bludgeoning, 9-minute noise-fest. On the flipside, the brief, jazzy album closer “Satellite” is one of their most charming duets. The rest - at least in hindsight - is the definition of transitional: hints of the beautiful noise to come poking out of familiar, if not tired, songforms.
Unlike a lot of their peers from the Trouser Press era, the band rolled lucky sevens as punk rock broke, signing to a cool, ambitious label (Matador - briefly distributed by Atlantic), enjoying unprecedented solidity (McNew hadn’t left!), and discovering their interest in distortion-over-all was right in line with the zeitgeist. Inspired by Loveless rather than shook, Painful swipes Neil Young’s old signifier of epic status, two versions of the same song - one quiet, one loud - and throws in a triumphant, seven-minute instrumental coda to boot. It’s all waves of feedback and distortion from organs and guitar in between, co-producer/engineer Roger Moutenot helping them blur rather than bury the vocals. As far as many fans under 40 are considered, despite Matador re-releasing the first three albums (NWHD and PYLT in a convenient twofer), Painful is where the band begins, the leap from jangle-pop to dream-pop like a legendary director going from black & white to color. I don’t agree, but I get it…and I like the chance to school cool kids that Yo La Tengo were very much an ‘80s band.
Not that I knew of them in elementary school, or anything. High school and Electr-O-Pura is when I first jumped on board, never having heard a note beforehand. A band on Matador in 1995 getting positive comparisons to Neil Young and the Velvets in SPIN? I didn’t need to. They were just showing off at this point, Kaplan claiming guitar god status, soloing all over the place. Soaring and stratifying like the Red Baron on “Flight Lesson,” humping the Acetone on “False Alarm,” re-writing U2’s “With Or Without You” on “My Heart’s Reflection,” either to pledge devotion to Georgia or make the Edge look like a pussy. Maybe both. His solos here are a big reason I never learned how to play one without going BRANG CLANG BRANK half way through.
Georgia holds her own throughout, providing so many reassuring lullabies you might forget one of her most audible phrases is “you remind me of what I don’t want to be.” But nothing they’ve done before or since tops the climactic “Blue Line Swinger." Ira's like Neil Young and a hurricane, Georgia keeping the beat and promising her devotion in the eye of it (James serving some crucial, subtle, John Paul Jones-like role on keyboard and/or bass). I can't pretend the frenzied euphoria that crests with a minute-plus of “ba da ba/ ba da” will blow the minds of skeptical poptimists or digital ravers, but if you're someone who’d romanticize seeing shows at Maxwell’s, it’s rapture.
Up next: Part 2 and the (relative) pop breakthrough!
(Electr-O-Pura, Fakebook, and Painful are respectively at 36, 180 and 217 on my 300 Favorite Albums Of All Time list - slightly outdated version here. I'm telling you this because I've found people are more inclined to discuss and share reviews if there's a quantitative element at the top or bottom they can easily debate. Prove me right!)