Album Review: Yo La Tengo - Stuff Like That There
Ayo, you ever see that movie Frank?
It was an indie movie that came out last year, or maybe the
year before that, starring Michael Fassbender as a mentally ill dude who was
the frontman for a strange art rock band. He wore a huge papier-mâché head, and
hooked a microphone cable into it to sing. He never took it off until the very
end of the movie, after he was hit by a car and the head was damaged.
Anyway, his band also featured Maggie Gyllenhaal, who played
the theramin and other gadgets. As you can imagine from my poor description of
it, it was a really weird movie—super funny and charming at first, but pretty
sad and kind of depressing by the end. I think my wife really liked it. I’m not
really sure how I felt about it one way or the other. it was a movie that
happened in front of me.
But why am I mentioning this movie when talking about the
new album from Yo La Tengo? Well, there’s a scene near the end of the movie
where the band, sans Frank, are playing in an empty dive bar. Maggie Gyllenhaal has taken over as the singer, and they are playing a slowed down, sad, lifeless version of “I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper.”
And that is, pretty much, what this album amounts to.
Yo La Tengo have been at it for over 30 years. And in that
time, specifically the last 20-ish, give or take, they’ve really settled into a
formula for their records. They knock out a few straight up bangers, they have
a few slow burning quiet jams, a few instrumentals, and then a bunch of songs
that are really, really long.
They kind of flipped it on their last record, 2013’s Fade.
It was their shortest in nearly 20 years, and it featured nothing over 6
minutes in length. For its follow up—not even really sure if this is a proper
follow up or not—but anyway, Stuff Like
That there is a collection of acoustic material: cover songs, and reworked
versions of songs that appeared on previous, much more interesting Yo La Tengo
records.
And yes, the band’s previous, quiet , slow burning moments
work, but they work when they are sandwiched in between, like, electric guitar
freak outs and 15 minute epics. A full record of this maudlin shit is really
pushing it.
And, oh how this record pushes it. It’s a real patience
tester; mostly because it’s so gosh darn boring.
I feel bad saying that, you know? Because I like Yo La
Tengo—heck, my wife and I danced to “Black Flowers” at our wedding. We’ve seen
them in concert. I own two Yo La Tengo t-shirts and I have a bulk of their
canon—most of it on 2xLP.
But as they ease into their third decade as a band, I don’t
know if they’ve lost interest in doing what people maybe expect or want out of
them, or if they are just losing steam as one of the stalwarts of indie rock. But
Stuff Like That There limps along
lifelessly and comes across as the sound of a band that is pretty much phoning
it in.
Maybe opening with a cover of a song called “My Heart’s Not
in It,” is a poor choice, you know?
Even in covering The Cure’s classic “Friday, I’m in Love,”
Yo La Tengo doesn’t exactly do it justice. While the original shimmers with
goth pop energy, in the aging hands of Yo La Tengo, that energy is just drained
away, and it sounds like the band just doesn’t care one way or the other if
they are playing music at all; or, it sounds like they just woke up from a nap
and are completely incapable of shaking the groggy feelings out.
The sense of the urgency, spunk, and innovation that resonated
through their standard studio fare is nowhere to be found on Stuff Like That There, which is a shame.
A bulk of the Yo La Tengo discography is most conducive to playing in the fall,
and so the fact that this is slated for a late August release was, at first,
great news for me.
But instead, what you get is an album drenched in malaise.
Even in things that are marginally pleasant to listen to, like “Awhileaway,” they
trudge along, bringing time down to a crawl.
Yo La Tengo is obviously not a band that attracts a lot of
new, young fans with each album cycle they embark on. And their original fan
base is obviously aging with them. Maybe they presume that as they age out of “rock”
music, their fans are doing the same, and that Stuff Like That There is the stuff they want. I’d like to think
that they are wrong about that.
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