Eugene weekly., February 17, 2011, Page 32, Image 32

music
BY VANESSA SALVIA
Deconstructing Pop
Yo La Tengo is genius + love
B
reak-up songs with gorgeous
atmospherics. Breezy, wistful pop
songs played alongside waves
of distortion. Plucky piano and drifts
of dreamlike noise. Dusky harmonies.
Welcome to Yo La Tengo, the quintessential
indie rock band that, somewhat quietly, has
been making music for the past 25 years,
with more talent between the members
than any three people have a right to.
The home ground of Yo La Tengo
— Hoboken, New Jersey — inspired
husband-and-wife duo Ira Kaplan (guitars,
piano, vocals) and Georgia Hubley (drums,
piano, vocals), who found each other in the
early ’80s through a mutual love of record
stores and the New York Mets. After some
initial shake-ups with personnel, bassist
and vocalist James McNew (he’s from
Brooklyn) joined 19 years ago. Popular
Songs, their 12th album, came out in 2009,
and plays like a mix tape that your cool
older cousin would make, full of songs
that take familiar sounds and do something
unexpected with them.
Rather than surprising fans with
mediocre output, the only surprise is that
each YLT album is consistently good. To
hear McNew tell it, though, they are just
a group of unremarkable people who are
particularly in love with music, obsessive
even. “We like and obsess over lots of
different kinds of music and always have
since we were little kids,” he said recently
by phone. “We’ve been obsessed with
music and, especially when we were
smaller, pop music.”
Some YLT songs seem made of the
same magical stuff as the pop hits of old
— not a reiteration of the same sounds,
but as though they were deconstructed and
stitched together with YLT’s particular
quirk. “It all goes in and comes out of our
brains in a less obvious way,” McNew says.
“But sometimes after we write something
it’ll occur to me that two bars of a bass part
that I’ve been playing for 10 years came
from some other song.”
Though Yo La Tengo tour regularly,
they’ve never before played Eugene — no
good explanation why not — but McNew
thinks they may have played Portland’s
Reed College, some 20 years ago. For this
roughly two-month tour, YLT are playing
two sets of music, the fi rst to be determined
by spinning a wheel. They’ve prepared one
of eight different sets of music for whatever
fortune or fate is revealed: maybe cover
songs, songs with people’s names in them,
songs starting with ‘s’ (there are a lot of
those).
If there’s anything missing from YLT’s
recent music, it’s the yearning of a band
still learning what they can do. “We’ve
been playing our instruments for 30 years
and we got a little better at it from all that
practice,” says McNew. “But we came in or
at least came to the idea of making music
and actually being in a band at a time when
there was kind of a revolutionary notion
that anybody could do it, and we wanted
to be proof that anybody could do it.” ew
Yo La Tengo plays with The Urinals 8 pm Sunday, Feb.
20, at WOW Hall; all ages, $15 adv., $18 door.
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FEBRUARY 17, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
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