living room sound fidelity

Where the Yo La Tengo side project, the Condo Fucks and the recently released record Fuckbook, sees Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew doing a pretty tasteful job of vintage punk entomology, my attention is turned more towards the actual Yo La Tengo record that the Condo Fucks reference. Released in 1990 when the band’s formative lineup is made up of Ira, Georgia and two other dudes (James would only join a few albums later), Fakebook was clearly the handiwork of pop music addicts mucking about in the living room, an album of covers and a few original songs radiating with Yo La Tengo’s familiar idiosyncrasies. The casual, unostentatious songcraft kicks off in mellow fashion with Ira’s “Can’t Forget”, and listeners won’t take long to trace its lost-love country melodies to the Flying Burrito Brothers revisited later down the tracklist on “Tried So Hard”. Fakebook is littered with many such signposts of Yo La Tengo’s musical influences: Ira’s all-time songwriting hero Ray Davies is represented here by the wickedly scathing ditty “Oklahoma, USA”, from the underappreciated Kinks gem Muswell Hillbillies; the exquisite ballad “Andalucia”, one of two John Cale songs the band have covered; the obligatory Daniel Johnston cover, “Speeding Motorcycle”. Yo La Tengo would move on to much greater things but it’s fair to say that the trio would never quite recapture the kind of jangly epiphanies expressed on earlier records like Fakebook, the kind of unassuming record perfect for listening to when you happen to be alone at home on a rainy afternoon, trying to piece back together half-remembered scraps of an earlier daydream.