Flak Magazine: Yo La Tengo's And then nothing turned itself inside-out, 03.15.00

Beginning with 1993's Painful the Hoboken, N.J. trio has batted 1.000. On that album, the group established itself as a laid-back, American indie rock outfit who also happened to own a droney, '60s-style (think Stereolab) organ. Songs like "Big Day Coming" and "From a Motel 6" saw the group break away from the jangly, faintly R.E.M.-ish tones of previous albums (but then wasn't every late '80s band with a guitar compared to Stipe and co. at some point?) and establish its own sound.

And that sound was characterized by Velvet Underground-inspired, non-testoseroney guitar licks; breathy, unassuming vocals and a trademark, one-and-two chord organ drone. Add to that the occasional organ or guitar freakout, and you have the basic YLT formula.

Yo La Tengo made it two in a row with Electr-o-pura (1995), which fused the minimalist, VU-approach of Painful with the pulsing guitar noise and studio trickery of bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. The music here was much more complex than anything to appear on Painful. Even the quiet songs sounded more layered than an onion. To keep the R.E.M. analogy alive, Electr-o-pura was YLT's Monster, only unlike that bargain-bin regular, the experimentation and time spent twiddling knobs in the studio worked, and the band's fans ate it up.

More importantly, the group had, by releasing consecutive great albums on a hot indie label, caught the attention of the music press. This helped set the publicity stage for the third release in the band's hat trick, I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, YLT's most diverse and lauded album to date.

As much as Electr-o-pura marked Yo La Tengo's maturation as a force to be reckoned with in the studio, I Can Hear... showed audiences its ability to straddle, hop and blend genres. Featuring bossanova beats; whiny country music; drum machines; vocals buried deep in the mix; noodling, Krautrocky organ drone; and even a fuzzed out Beach Boys cover, I Can Hear... was the group's large green explosion for any critic or self-dubbed hipster who had missed the band's previous flashes on the American indie radar. The album was a mainstay on year-end Top Ten lists, and even cracked Spin's top 90 albums of the '90s.

The short version of all that is that Yo La Tengo has a lot to live up to with "And then nothing turned itself inside-out" — the long-awaited (almost three years) follow-up to I Can Hear... Having captured the attention of every critic and trendsetter in North America, the members of YLT — if they care about these things — can read reviews of Inside-out on the pages of People and Elle, not to mention spot their album on the Billboard charts — a first for the group.

Interestingly, the band has taken a step back from the molasses-thick layering of Electr-o-pura and the genre-hopping on I Can Hear... If there's an album Inside-out most resembles, it's the more basic Painful, though the developments of recent years are still noticeable to the careful ear.

The album opens with the droning, strung-out "Everyday," in which the emotionless vocals recall virtually anything off of The Velvet Underground and Nico. A minimalist programmed drum-beat, and a bass line that winds up and down the scale, propel the heroin-y song through its six-and-a-half-minute course, while maracas and incidental percussion pop in and out of the mix.

Speaking of incidental percussion, "Saturday," the first single off of the album, is not to be missed. Similar in tempo (or lack thereof) to "Everyday," the song is propelled by a modulated, programmed drumbeat that's sped up and slowed down as Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley's quiet cooing details the fine art of mentally tuning out on an weekend's evening. Throughout the song, we hear tinkling piano, barely-tapped chimes and sporadic maracas.

Kaplan's honest, hushed, half-spoken confessionals on the begging-to-be-used-in a-hip-romantic-comedy falling-in-love scene "Our Way to Fall" and the cleverly titled "The Crying of Lot G" bring to mind his mumbly, shy-guy vocals on I Can Hear...'s standout track, "Autumn Sweater."

The band lets its hair down a bit more as the album develops. "Cherry Chapstick" is a hard-rockin', Jesus and Mary Chain-style rocker minus the Mary Chain's cooler-than-you attitude and plus a little fun; while "You Can Have it All" is the band's obligatory cover tune. "Madeline" resurrects the bossa nova beats employed so successfully on I Can Hear..., while "Tired Hippo" is a slinky, Latin exotica-style instrumental that evokes the spirit of, say a slow, sexy '60s surf scene.

The album concludes with the 17-minute, slowly building "Night Falls on Hoboken." Beginning with brushed snare, gently strummed guitar and hushed voices — like most of the other songs start — the song collapses into a bass-driven, swirling, almost Eastern-style —in spots, the feedback resembles a sitar — drone before ending in a trebly analog wash.

So what we have then is a four-fer by Yo La Tengo. And after all these musical diversions, what could we have expected other than a hearkening back to the sound that made the band so enjoyable to begin with?

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)