silence kit #11

Yo La Tengo
Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out [Matador, 2000]

Not too long ago The Onion AV Club listed 25 albums “that work best when listened from start to finish”, from which my first reaction was that the selections veered, not expectedly, toward several what you might deem as concept albums: The Who’s Quadrophenia; XTC’s Skylarking; Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, just to name three. But getting deeper into it, I thought the list should be a bit more about songs rather than song cycles – specifically, or simply put, the relationship or thematic tie between songs, and how they benefit more from being sequenced next to each other than when listened to divorced from the album’s context. (Of course I’m making shit sense here too.)

To me, Yo La Tengo’s 2000 studio masterpiece And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (my personal favorite of the band’s output) fits the bill perfectly, an album of willowy summer-sad songs wheeled together into a long, swooning interlude of intimacy (77 minutes in all). While their nineties-indie classics (more on those next time) had the more expansive vibes, Yo La Tengo opened the 2000s with a newfound soft-and-bouncy flourish, favoring whispery keyboard affects over loud guitar feedbacks. The dreamy gaswork atmospherics of “Everyday” set the agenda brilliantly and many of the subsequent songs (“Saturday”, “From Black To Blue”) follow its reticent patterns right through to the 18-minute drone-fest finale “Night Falls On Hoboken”, domestic climes and old-time feelings unfolding in centegenarian pace.

And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out has largely been interpreted as the album that scrounges hazily through every nook and cranny of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley’s marriage (which is maybe why it is best listened to from start to finish), and sure enough, as with most relationships, there are moments of peace and maddening bliss (watching them perform “Our Way To Fall” live gave me fucking goosebumps every time) balanced with some facsimile of discontentment and strife (“The Crying Of Lot G” employs a Thomas Pynchon book title to explore marital paranoia). While I am not sure how much Ira is referring to Whit Stillman’s underrated film on “Last Days Of Disco”, perhaps no other pop song captures the edge-of-illusion essence of unaccountable nostalgia better than this one tune.