Yo La Tengo has a reputation of being the archetypal “critics’ band”, but despite a stint as a college radio DJ in the mid-1990s and a lifetime of listening to music that should be Yo La Tengo-adjacent, I had somehow managed to completely miss actually hearing them until I decided to tackle their work for this Late to the Party article. I don’t even know much about them except that everybody who likes “indie” or (as we used to call it) “alternative” music seems to know all about them… except me. And as I started listening, I got a sense of why professional critics might like them: they clearly draw on lots of earlier influences and have influenced lots of bands in turn. But since I’m not a music critic, and have never really paid too much attention to musicians’ personalities or histories or the scenes they emerge from, etc., I have sometimes felt like I’m in over my head as far as trying to really evaluate Yo La Tengo’s role in indie rock history, its musical pedigree, and so on. So instead, I’ve decided to focus on just listening to the music as I hear it, and hopefully having something interesting to say about my first impressions. (And if you already know YLT, you’ll notice that I wrote up each album more or less as I listened to it, so my reactions to the band’s evolving sound are approximately in real time.)
Ride the Tiger (1986)
Yo La Tengo’s first album was Ride the Tiger, released in 1986 on Coyote Records. Featuring the core duo (and married couple) of Ira Kaplan on vocals and guitar and Georgia Hubley on drums, with Dave Schramm on lead guitar and Mike Lewis and Clint Conley sharing bass duties, the album comes out of the gate with a series of very distinct songs that in many ways set the template for the first few albums. There’s the soft-edged and somewhat countrified rock of “Cone of Silence” which immediately made me think of R.E.M. of this era (cf. Fables of the Reconstruction, Life’s Rich Pageant), and which gains a slight but appealing edge from Schramm’s bold and noisy guitar solo near the end.
Next is “Big Sky”, a quirky indie take on humanity’s struggle to get God to pay attention to their problems; the riff on this one is a curious exploration of several different licks/phrases/rhythmic structures that seem like they wouldn’t normally go together, but create an interesting mood nonetheless. This track is a good an example as any of Ira Kaplan’s early vocal and lyrical style: a mixture of spoken and (to be honest) somewhat inexpertly sung lyrics with an often charmingly naive take on a big subject. It’s also a perfect example of a recurring problem in the band’s early albums: Kaplan has an uncertain and often mumbly approach that is (maybe not coincidentally) often a bit too low in the mix, making it hard to hear or pay attention to the lyrics. This feels like a big gap for me, since I generally rely a lot on lyrics and a strong vocal style to orient myself to the emotions of a song (favorite examples include David Byrne, PJ Harvey, Screaming Females, but even “unprofessional” singers with a distinct style like Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening). The vocals feel pretty limp for almost the entire album, which took a lot of the air out of what could have been some stronger musical moments.
The third song on the album, “The Evil That Men Do”, sets a much more rockin’ musical tone, with a significantly faster tempo and riff, and guitars turned up to 11 for significant portions of the track. Kaplan’s attempt at angry rocker vocals is still unconvincing but at least has a bit of edge, and the music pulls a lot more weight here in setting a specific tone. As the closing ring of feedback transitioned into the simple but ominous opening riff of “The Forest Green”, I had my first “oh HERE we go” moment with Yo La Tengo as the album seemed to settle into a somewhat more rock-oriented groove and pick up some momentum. Naturally, this momentum then hit a wall with the very next track, the glacially-paced ballad “The Pain of Pain”, saved once again at the last second by a Dave Schramm solo that erupts at the last second to bring some real emotion into what’s otherwise a pretty generically sad song.
The rest of the album continues among much the same lines, with a fair amount of whipsawing between different styles that I labeled in my mind as “alt-country” (e.g. Cone of Silence, The Pain of Pain, The Way Some People Die, The River of Water), “noise rock” (The Evil That Men Do, Screaming Dead Balloons) and a grab-bag “quirky indie” category (Big Sky, The Empty Pool, A House Is Not A Motel). Similarly, I found myself hurtling between a wide range of positive, negative and generally unimpressed takes on different aspects of the album, and it was strangely difficult to develop an overall impression of it; among other things, the track sequencing made it hard to feel like I was getting into a flow.
The album has a good overall sound, and each instrument stands out clearly while still being smoothly integrated into the mix (except the vocals, as noted). There’s not a lot of distortion (even on the “noise” tracks), but some very skilled use of reverb, chorus, short delay etc., especially on Schramm’s lead guitar, to highlight particular licks or solos. The chord sequences are often interesting and unconventional, but the guitar work (outside of Schramm’s consistently sharp and exciting solos) is a lot of the same combination of heavy strumming and ringing arpeggios. I scribbled in my notebook that “these guys never leave spaces between notes”, and if the guitars are going to be that consistently “rhythmic”, I wish that Hubley and Lewis could have broken out a bit more creatively on the drums and bass. Instead, I sometimes had the impression of listening to a four-person rhythm section where every part was competently executed, but they were all waiting for the others to do the interesting, unexpected, improvised part. On faster songs (The Evil That Men Do, Empty Pool, Closing Time), the tempo even sometimes seems to get away from them a little bit, undermining even the emotional power that comes with an aggressively fast rhythm on its own.
In short, my first impression of Yo La Tengo was a decidedly mixed bag. Ride The Tiger is kind of like listening to three different albums at once, and none of them has enough space to really get going. These are skilled musicians who come up with a lot of interesting ideas and moments that somehow fail to gel into a consistent experience, leaving me intrigued but not altogether impressed as I turned to their second album.
New Wave Hot Dogs (1987)
New Wave Hot Dogs saw the departure of Dave Schramm (leaving all guitars to Kaplan, apparently) and the arrival of Stephan Wichnewski to take over on bass. The album starts off on an exciting note with “Clunk”, a rough-edged rocker with a main riff that sounds a lot like a truncated version of the one from Blue Öyster Cult’s classic “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”. Kaplan’s vocals are at least somewhat more confident here, if still a bit indistinct, and his solo has some of Dave Schramm’s bold and noisy energy, though it feels less focused somehow. Still, the song has a real drive to it that definitely got my attention. Unfortunately, it turns out to be one of the very few real highlights of the album.
The overall sound of NWHD is a little more cohesive than on Ride the Tiger, and generally has a more jangly and treble-heavy character than that album. It still features the same alternation between indie-rock and noise-rock influences (and a smaller touch of alt-country), yet somehow they all seem less inspired than the first time around. The noisy songs feel more chaotic this time, and not in a good way; just a bunch of feedback and yelling that doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose (House Fall Down, Let’s Compromise, The Story of Jazz). The indie rock is really on the soft and sleepy side for the most part (Lewis, Lost in Bessemer, 3 Blocks From Groove Street), and even the faster numbers generally fail to inspire (Serpentine, A Shy Dog). My main reaction is that a lot of this album just sounds like generic early 90s college radio; given that NWHD came out in 1987, however, maybe it still sounded ahead of its time to contemporary listeners.
I can’t help but notice that almost none of these songs really seem to have a distinctive riff or melodic hook, except for the main riff in “Clunk” and the chorus of “It’s All Right (The Way That You Live)”, which turns out to be a Velvet Underground cover. A direct comparison to VU’s demo version of that unreleased song, unpolished and abysmally mixed as it is, immediately highlights Yo La Tengo’s continuing weakness (to my ear) at this point in their career: they just really don’t have that much personality. Lou Reed’s unprofessional but touchingly sad and friendly voice has infinitely more charisma than Ira Kaplan’s mumbling, and even Reed’s relatively inattentive performance on the guitar in this recording seems to carry more emotion than Yo La Tengo’s slower, cleaner, more rehearsed take. As I come to the end of this second album, I have a weird feeling that Yo La Tengo has good potential but doesn’t quite have the energy to bring it to life, and the case of “It’s All Right” really brought that out clearly for me.
President Yo La Tengo (1989)
President Yo La Tengo again starts with a strong track that caught my interest, this time with the noisy-yet-mellow “Barnaby, Hardly Working”. As jangly electric guitars lay down a vaguely melancholy chord sequence, a melodic feedback tone cycles between the major seventh and the tonic (I think?), keeping the listener incessantly cycling between feelings of tension and release. It’s a simple song that’s loud yet melodic, rough-edged yet soothing, and reminiscent of contemporary (or slightly later) Sonic Youth.
While “Barnaby” is the clear highlight here, it also reflects a positive tendency for the album as a whole, as YLT gradually seem to be getting a grip on how to use noise and speed effectively (as heard on “Drug Test” and “Orange Song”, respectively) without descending into chaos. The mellower moments are getting closer to the mark, too, like the shimmery, surfy jam of “The Evil That Men Do (Craig’s Version)”, which sounds a lot like a Pixies B-side and nothing like the YLT song of the same name from Ride the Tiger. Similarly, “Alyda” mixes up the strummy indie-rock formula a bit with the simple addition of backing vocals from Georgia Hubley, including a wordless vocal hook that gives the song a little emotional depth.
Still, nothing after “Barnaby” really excited me about this album, and it completely goes off the rails at the end with an impossibly long (10:36) and unpleasantly noisy live rendition of “The Evil That Men Do (Pablo’s Version)”, followed by a slow, flaccid cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away”. With the evil that they did on these last two tracks, YLT threw away most of the good will I had been trying to muster up for the earlier highlights of the album, and I was left yet again with a weak overall impression of the band.
Fakebook (1990)
At this point in my journey, I was really struggling to keep listening to a band that frankly didn’t inspire me much at all. In fact, I got so bogged down in each the first three albums that, despite having signed up for this article in December, it took me until the start of March to get through just those first three. Fortunately, their fourth album, Fakebook, turned out to be an extremely welcome change of pace. Though the 1990 release date probably makes this obvious, it may be useful to point out that the title has nothing to do with social media, but refers to a book of guitar tablature that lets you “fake” knowledge of how to play a song. That title reflects the fact that this album consists mostly of cover versions, and indeed, that’s probably the key to its success (along with the temporary return of Dave Schramm on lead guitar). With “It’s All Right” back on New Wave Hot Dogs, I felt that YLT brought down a song by a great band by filtering it through their own weaknesses; here, they learn from the strengths of other artists to really grow as a band.
Unlike the earlier albums, Fakebook doesn’t start with its strongest track, but I still quickly got the sense of a more cohesive sound and greater overall confidence. The first three songs (Can’t Forget, Griselda, Here Comes My Baby) still strike me as somewhat middle-of-the-road indie or folk pop, but Ira Kaplan’s vocals are finally at the right level in the mix, he is committing more to his role as the singer, and the songs have riffs and hooks that give them each a distinct character. On the fourth track, YLT turn back to an earlier album to present a quiet, shimmery cover of their own song (“Barnaby, Hardly Working”), to good effect.
But it’s in the middle third of the album that Fakebook really hits its stride. The shortest way to describe it is that the album takes a sharp turn into the Sixties here, with harmonies and ringing guitar riffs that evoke the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas on “Yellow Sarong” and “You Tore Me Down”, or playful 50s pop with “Emulsified”, whose call-and-response vocals made me think of Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash”. My notes on this silly, fun little song are full of exclamation points because “IRA IS FINALLY INTO IT! YES!!” But more importantly, all three of these prominently feature backing vocals, mostly from drummer Georgia Kaplan. This wasn’t her first time singing for YLT, certainly, but using both singers at once singing real harmonies is a bit of a departure at this point, and it sounds great! Clearly, working with other artists’ material is opening up some really positive new directions for the band.
The rest of the album turns back to a more folky and indie-rock direction, but the “fakebook” format largely continues to succeed in breaking Yo La Tengo out of the doldrums. From the sweet, dorky Daniel Johnston cover “Speeding Motorcycle”, to the countrified Velvet Underground tone of “Tried So Hard” (Gene Clark) and “What Comes Next” (a YLT original), my notes on most of these tracks are filled with excited relief over these skilled musicians finally getting their creative act together, with thoughts like “You can hear the lyrics!” “Noticing so much space between notes!” “OMG they are finally doing it!” That last comment comes from my favorite track on the album, “The Summer”. This is another YLT original, and starts with husky Kaplan and Hubley vocals over a simple acoustic guitar riff on low strings that’s soon joined by light chords on the high strings of an electric guitar, culminating in a brilliantly simple dissonant descending riff over the one-line chorus/vocal hook: ‘Til the summer comes undone. Having suddenly experienced a much more engaging side of Yo La Tengo on this album, I was intrigued to hear what would come next.
May I Sing With Me (1992)
On their fifth album, YLT finally settles into their permanent lineup, with Kaplan on guitars, Hubley on drums and James McNew on bass. But their stylistic meanderings aren’t over just yet. The album starts with another mid-tempo indie rock number, “Detouring America With Horns”, that’s prettier and more polished than some of their earlier attempts but not particularly thrilling. The album continues in a tone that mostly falls somewhere between power pop (“Upside-Down”) and noisy indie rock (“Mushroom Cloud of Hiss”, “Some Kinda Fatigue”, “Out the Window”). There’s still a certain lack of catchy hooks or dynamic song structure which (as on previous albums) makes a number of these songs wear out their welcome before the halfway mark, and the most interesting moments on these faster tracks seem to be almost hidden away, like the strange looping feedback noise that descends into a swirl of pleasantly Sonic Youth-y chaos about 6:30 into “Mushroom Cloud of Hiss”, or the aggressively bendy two-note riff in “Out the Window” that is weirdly mixed lower than the drums and uninspired vocals for most of the track.
For once, the slower songs on this album appealed to me a bit more, frequently finding a sadly mellow and droning mood that felt good to sink into for long minutes at a time (notably “Swing for Life” with a length of 5:06, and “Sleeping Pill” at 9:44). These were the best showcase for a tendency I noticed elsewhere on the album too: YLT was continuing to get better at capturing and controlling feedback, long droning notes on instruments turned up to 11, and other sorts of noise to add more texture and mood to their songs. For a band that sometimes seemed to struggle a bit with song structure and keeping the listener’s interest, this was clearly a step in the right direction.
By the time I started listening to and writing about May I Sing With Me, I had gathered from various online sources that the band was about to fully embrace the noisier parts of its personality. While I was certainly looking forward to hearing YLT continue to evolve in that direction, nothing could have prepared me for the quantum leap that awaited me on the next album.
Painful (1993)
I had seen YLT’s sixth album (and their first on Matador Records) described as their “breakthrough release” and a major change for the band, but the quiet album opener, “Big Day Coming”, sounded a lot like more of the handful of slow, droning, noise-enhanced jams that appeared on the previous album (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Then, all of a sudden, the second track was “From a Motel 6” and my life with Yo La Tengo would never be the same.
The song tears right into a noisy riff that fits right in with Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine from the same period, and the ethereal and understated vocals add a perfect melancholy counterpoint. That main riff is devastatingly efficient and emotionally explosive: just one triumphant high, bendy note on the tonic for one measure, then a swooping descent into controlled noise (lean on the whammy bar, flick the pickup switch) as McNew’s Kim-Gordon-esque bass holds down a simple two-note riff. Two measures, repeat. The song has as simple a structure as any other YLT song, if not simpler; the bass, in particular, only varies slightly during the pre-chorus and bridge but otherwise stays on those same two notes. What defines the song for me is the texture of how the vocals weave in and out of the quieter undistorted guitar on the verses, the unstoppable chorus riff, and the intermittent bursts of noise in between.
In Hal Hartley’s (!) video for this song (posted above), the band spends the entire video setting up their gear to play the 15 seconds around Ira Kaplan’s noisy solo at 1:53, then breaks down their gear for the rest of the time. While this is mainly just a goof by a band that clearly doesn’t have much interest in making videos, it neatly highlights the new importance of raw yet controlled noise in YLT’s sound. My long-running concern about “no space between notes” (and generally not giving the music room to breathe) is finally resolved as the band uses layered production and a wide variety of effects and noise, and even a new instrument (electric organ) to create big, textured spaces for their pared-down riffs and vocal lines to explore. It’s a huge change for the band, and a hugely positive one in every way.
A number of the songs on this record still use structures and habits that are recognizable from earlier albums, like “A Worrying Thing” and “The Whole of the Law”, but substantially improved by the new production and a lighter touch in general. (My handwritten notes from this listening session say, “Before, you could almost hear how hard they were trying, but now it just flows.”) In general, though, I like the songs that lean into the noisier new approach much more, from the lower-key “Superstar-Watcher” and “Nowhere Near” (the latter with its Duane Eddy-inspired guitar and descent into melodic noise toward the end) to the tracks that most fully embrace the new sound: “Double Dare” (which sounds a lot like something off of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album Goo, maybe “Tunic”), “From a Motel 6”, and the album’s other major standout, “I Was the Fool Beside You for Too Long”. This latter song is slower than the other two, but slowly builds up to massive intensity without any of the speed, chaos, or screaming we heard on early albums— just adding and removing and overlapping layers of sound.
Not every song on this album hits the bullseye — “Sudden Organ” has a little of the overcaffeinated bashing-about of earlier “noisy” tracks, and “Big Day Coming [Second Version]” adds to YLT’s catalog of semi-pointless reimaginings of their own songs — but Painful instantly became my favorite Yo La Tengo album by a mile, and made this whole process worthwhile in my mind. I only wish I had gotten to it a little earlier than March 26th for an article that was due to be posted on March 30…
Electr-o-pura (1995)
After suddenly planting a flag far into noisy art-rock territory on Painful, YLT would have to decide how to build on that move with their seventh album. Opening track “Decora” continues more or less in the Painful mold, combining a simple riff and textured production with charming low-key vocals from Georgia Hubley, and a hooky chorus with a “glissando” vocal line and a complementary riff on a distorted lead guitar.
It’s followed by the Sonic Youthiest (and my favorite) track on the album, “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)”, another song that skillfully builds tension and excitement and keeps the surprises coming throughout its length. After that, Electr-o-pura seems more focused on trying to integrate the band’s other influences and “creative ethic” with the new overall sound. Sometimes this works quite nicely, like on “The Ballad of Red Buckets” or “Pablo and Andrea”, a slower mid-tempo ballad with a sparkly guitar solo at about 2:45 that reminded me a bit of Dave Schramm’s work way back on “The Pain of Pain” on the first album.
A number of other songs don’t succeed quite so well, like “The Hour Grows Late”, “Don’t Say A Word”, or “Tom Courtenay”, for which the best praise I could muster up in my notes were phrases like “inoffensive, nice production, a decent-sounding implementation of a not-so-interesting musical idea”. Fans who may have really gotten into the more strummy poppy ballads and such from the pre-Painful era might find a lot to like here, though; I guess it’s just not my style. Still, as flat as YLT’s songwriting can be sometimes (at least on the musical side — I swear I still can’t remember more than maybe 20 words of lyrics across all the albums I’ve heard, but maybe they’re good if you listen closely?), the improved production with its greater “breathing room” goes a surprisingly long way in making even their weaker songs listenable.
Besides all that, YLT also finds a little room to experiment on Electr-o-pura, with the quietly quirky “Paul Is Dead” about hearing a random guy singing on the street while listening to the Rolling Stones on his Walkman (guess I did listen to the lyrics on this one), or the goofy organ-enhanced noise-a-thon “False Alarm”. These tracks weren’t great, but after the revelation of Painful I was much more inclined to listen carefully to YLT’s experimentations and appreciate their willingness to take weird risks. I guess my overall takeaway from this album is that, even though I didn’t like it nearly as much as the one before it, it at least has YLT sounding like a band I could really enjoy listening to — a feat that only Painful and certain parts of Fakebook had really achieved up to this point.
I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One (1997)
As a result of my early struggles with Yo La Tengo’s first few albums, plus my general tendency to procrastinate on virtually everything, I only got as far as their eighth album (out of a whopping 12 released in the official “Late to the Party” eligibility window ending in 2010) before it was time to wrap up this article and post it. I’m really glad that I made it this far in the allotted time, though, because I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One is widely considered to be YLT’s best album, and it just nudges out Painful for first place in my own personal ranking.
As with Electr-o-pura, the album starts with a number of noise-pop tracks, including a funky and off-kilter rocker entitled “Moby Octopad” with judicious doses of noise, and the poppier stylings of “Sugarcube”. While this is still the style that appeals most to me personally, what really makes this album a success is that YLT here finishes the work they started on Electr-o-pura to integrate their eclectic pop sensibility with their post-Painful approach to production and arrangements. “Damage” is a lovely sad song about seeing an ex again after a breakup; the music mostly consists of bass and toms, with the guitars only emerging for layers of muted noise and a quiet little riff to emphasize the lyrical punchline (The damage is done). On “Shadows”, Georgia Hubley’s naive melancholy vocals gain a nice emotional punch from a couple of pleasantly off-key chord changes. On these and several other songs, YLT continue to show great restraint in letting their songs breathe and doing more with less.
The band also continues to successfully (or at least “interestingly”) explore other styles, from the countrified lap-steel balladeering of “Green Arrow” and the jazzy bossa nova of “Center of Gravity” to an 11-minute krautrock jam (“Spec Bebop”). There’s even an early Beach Boys cover on here (“Little Honda”) — truly something for everyone. At this late point in the process, I don’t necessarily have much specific to say about these tracks, but more than any other Yo La Tengo album before it, I found that I could really just put on my headphones and sink into the album, finding something to enjoy about every track (and still really cranking a few of them up and going back to listen repeatedly). I had won the struggle over myself. I loved Yo La Tengo.
And with that, most patient readers, my time with Yo La Tengo is at an end. Or rather, my time with this article — I fully intend to keep listening to Painful and Beating As One, and to explore the band’s later albums as well. YLT took a long time to work out what they were really trying to do, and to become “professionals” at it (as I saw one reviewer put it), but once they nailed it, they damn well nailed it. For any other newcomers out there, I would recommend starting with Fakebook to get a sense of their eclectic interests, then some combination of Painful, Electr-o-pura and I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One (and beyond!) to dive into the noise-pop sound they’re best known for. Thanks so much for reading!