What can you do when you leave work at 5:15 pm and there is a Yo La Tengo concert at Amoeba at 6pm? Well, you rush to the store and you immediately feel depressed when lurking at the super long line outside the building,… I didn’t know Yo La Tengo was this popular! I guess I should have known better, they have been around for so long, almost 30 years, and I am ashamed to admit I didn’t know much about them… but I was alone on this since Amoeba was a total full house on Thursday night.
They are currently touring in support of their last album ‘Fade’, that I hadn’t even listened to before going to the show, but I have been catching up on what I have missed since. The first thing I noticed with them was their restrained decibel level, I know too well how so many bands feel the necessity to play as loud as possible, as if it was a requirement to sound cool. But there wasn’t anything like this during Yo La Tengo’s set, some songs were actually very quiet, letting us appreciate the subtlety of their sonic grooves and busy soundscapes. Take ‘Is That Enough’, off their new album, and this is exactly what I am talking about; they sung it so quietly, so sweetly that all its Velvet-Stephanie-Says quality was harmoniously balanced between breezy vocals and guitars.
As I found a-not-so-bad spot in a vinyl section row, two clear things jumped at my ears right away: their songs were totally catchy at the first listening, whereas unpredictable, something that could sound like a contradiction but Yo La Tengo managed to find the right balance between creativity and inventiveness and familiar grooves you could have hummed when leaving the store. They received a lot of applause for ‘I’ll Be Around’, another new song that they transformed into a minimalist beauty with crystalline guitar and a soothing Nick Drake-y atmosphere.
Ira Kaplan, who was often bent over his guitar, was quite talkative between songs, while his wife Georgia Hubley on drums was staying quiet, keeping a low but efficient profile, providing a subtle touch during the most quiet numbers and some harmonious backup vocals. Kaplan was talking about one of his guitars for sale, was asking his bassist James McNewhow what records he had spotted in the store, and was telling us he had passed a few times in front of Amoeba during the afternoon to see the big ‘Yo La Tengo’ sign… but there was no way this sounded narcissistic,… as all their fans know, these guys are anything but pretentious.
They raised the punk level a bit during a frenetic-aggressive one-minute cover song featuring bassist James McNew on lead vocals, and they also played the opener of the album, the electrifying ‘Ohm’, a sprawling groovy tune, that they may even have stretched a little bit, featuring a delicious pop vocal melody floating above krautrocky-meets-Indian guitars going crescendo, producing a tunneling effect of distorted noise pedals layered by calming harmonies. But even though this song was faster and louder than others, the agitation never took over the vocals which was bravely and surely soaring above the fuzz, a very good thing considering the interesting and heartfelt lyrics, such as ‘Sometimes the bad guys come out on top/Sometimes the good guys lose/We try not to lose our hearts/Not to lose our minds’…
Closing their set with ‘Before We Run’ just demonstrated how original the structures of their songs are, starting quietly, the tune did slowly wake up with repetitive guitars and circle drumming, little by little adding to the rich sonic texture, and ending in an almost celebratory high after wandering for a long time around the same thought.
The set was rather short, just consisting of six songs, but it was sweet and totally the kind of soothing sound needed after a busy work day, wrapping the room with a hypnotic warmth that could have kept going for very long. And the crowd visibly wanted more of their windy jams of distortion and fuzz balancing their whimsical melodies, but they also had to do a signing of ‘Fade’, a record that Ira Kaplan is hoping to turn gold.
