Fade – Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo have always moved discreetly for Titans. Having first dropped an album in, wait for
it, 1986, they have continued to regularly and expertly assemble them ever
since. Without the radio. Without
magazine covers. Without fuss. The music has varied a bit around the band’s
equilibrium point and between the asymptotes of fuzzy white noise and
shuffling--pardon the expression--groovy-ness.
But an equilibrium they have always preserved. Forever, seemingly. (More than 12 albums now, which is a valid contemporary
synonym for “forever.”)
This is canonical stuff.
Spanning non-chronological phenomena including but not limited to: The Smiths, Butt
Rock, "Alternative Rock," Speed Metal, Lilith Fair, digital music files, Color Me
Badd, Counting Crows, Linkin Park, and Razorlight, a career (ongoing) such as
that produced by YLT is clearly akin to Always Beating the House. With apologies to Pavement and Guided By
Voices, and without apologies to the Pixies (enough already with the Pixies) Yo
La Tengo can now accurately claim to be the finest indie band in American
history.
Although I feel quite certain that they would never make
such a claim.
Fade once again
lovingly constructs a three-story colonial upon the dear foundation pillars of Madchester dance steps and post-shoegaze backgrounds of noise-melody. (There is an obvious debt to the Velvet
Underground in the work of YLT, which is like saying there is a debt to carbon
in the chemistry of Earth. But the
touchstones of the second-half of the band’s career are more populist. The pleasant facts are that there are
thousands if not millions of us out there who for a brief time in the 1990s
figured that God wielded a trident rather than a lightning bolt or a staff, and
that the three prongs of said trident were Madchester, Shoegaze, and Trip-hop. Leave it to the wisdom of YLT to discern
earlier than most that two of those were going to age like Julianne Moore and
the third like unrefrigerated mayonnaise.)
YLT have now passed more than a decade of elder-statesmen
albums, each as lovely as the previous, which succeed smartly at transplanting
these two foreign-born cues into the American suburbs via New Jersey. It should not have worked even once, and it
has worked every single time.
The Baggy, Madchester scene required a cargo-plane full of ecstacy to get a generation of pale, scrawny, zit-laden British kids over
themselves and into the middle of what we must assume were lots of pretty
hilarious-appearing dance floor scenes.
Shoegazing took the same awkwardness and allowed it to lash out with
amplified all-encompassing and all-deflecting Noise. Noise as outlet. Noise as shield. Noise as beauty. In one of these scenarios, we acted out. In
the other, we got over ourselves. Either
way, we were better off, and it was quite seriously beautiful.
“Ohm,” is the leadoff track and an obvious linguistic nod to
bulky receiver units and chunky headphone cables. The shuffling beat is there out front and the
fucking glorious distortion is filling a fair amount of the background. It is a perfectly composed moving picture,
and there is, in uber-YLT style, a bit of falsetto as well.
(The necessarily weak and half-formed counter argument to
YLT as Best American Indie Band Ever probably involves singing voices, until
you stop and realize that the only two serious competitors for the title are
Stephen Malkmus and Robert Pollard. Ira
Kaplan of YLT has a lovely voice! He wins that skirmish.)
The improbable-but-habitual beautiful background drone continues
on second track “Is That Enough,” (there is no question mark, but we must
assume that, if this is a question about anything to do with the band, the
question is rhetorical.) Out front this
time is a pretty, wandering guitar line and a lovely vocal…and while we are
just about as close to a Radio Song as we are going to get on a YLT album, we
are still pretty far away. Like, hope-you-packed-enough-potable-water far away.
By the third and fourth ditties we are well on the way to
another pocket miracle of an album.
Foremost among remarkable YLT characteristics is how perfectly they manage to conjure the American Suburbs. Direct references to such are
scarce-to-absent. But within the bars of
these songs lawns glisten, family cars rest post-wash, grills leak smoky
deliciousness, and above it all, the Young Ones stretch out in their
hermetically-sealed bedrooms with books and video games and pop art and
headphones. This music is similarly
private and narrow-angle and even a little bit lonely without a glimpse of
despair.
Which brings us to track six, “I’ll Be Around.” Is there a better song title to capture the
concept of the previous paragraph? (Hint:
that question was rhetorical.)
It is nighttime in the burbs now, warm second stories aligned neatly in
rows, and very few stars penetrating the protective glare of massed
streetlights. The simple melody is achingly pretty, and then this: “When I stare into space, I’m looking for you
/ and I can see you at times.” Maybe
sad. Definitely pretty. And never
despairing.
Deepest night follows on “Cornelia and Jane,” “I hear
the whispering just out of view / still unknown what’s inside of you.” We are, post-bedtime, also now at the very tangled
heart of the suburban nest. “Outside
your window neighbors peer in at you / how can we care for you?” Some of this is the comfort of community.
Some of it is creepy in the manner that no one lives alone in a Community. But the melodies—always the melodies!—imply
that comfort is winning out.
The faux-downside to every YLT album is this: you can fall happily asleep to just about all
of them. Fade is no different and probably more overtly drowsy than most. This review false-started with a nap that commenced
around track 3 and receded with the horns of track 9. So. Be. It.
Truth may not be beauty.
But beauty in indie music almost always argues for truth. And the truth is that Yo La Tengo are going
to finish their careers as an American treasure very few notches indeed below
the Beach Boys, above the entirety of the remainder of American Indie, and
holding a two-pronged trident.
Keepers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10
February 2013
