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.

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.