Yo La Tengo
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The husband-and-wife team of guitarist and organist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley has served as the band’s core throughout its lengthy history, but it wasn’t until the arrival of bassist James McNew on 1992’s May I Sing With Me (Alias) that Yo La Tengo got its proverbial shit together. Their earliest releases, with an ever-shuffling cast of bass players, demonstrated a nicely ragged post-Velvet Underground folk-rock appeal. Kaplan’s growing confidence on guitar eventually took the band into noisier terrain as he introduced extended fractured solos, off-kilter structures, and ear-piercing feedback that often bordered on tedious self-indulgence. Kaplan loses himself when he plays, doubling over his instrument as if under its sway. On the gorgeously anomalous Fakebook (Bar/None, 1990) the group tackled a passel of rock nuggets, covering everyone from the Kinks to Peter Stampfel to the unfairly obscure The Scene Is Now in a stripped-down, quiet acoustic setting. Yo La Tengo toured extensively, exhibiting a pleasingly gentle side, but before long the barrage of feedback returned and was captured on May I Sing With Me, their least friendly outing. Working those long, largely hook-free noise vehicles while on the road enabled the band to blend the disparate elements of their music into a cogent whole. On 1993’s Painful (Matador/Atlantic) the band masterfully fused gentleness with ferocity, melody with noise, and thoughtfulness with impulsiveness, vibrantly weaving together many diverse strands.
While the recent Electr-O-Pura (Matador)–unquestionably the band’s finest recording–brilliantly continued where Painful left off, Yo La Tengo have refused to succumb to any formula. A new EP called Camp Yo La Tengo features completely revamped versions of a pair of tunes from the latest album. “Tom Courtenay” on the album is a glorious slab of pop, an infectious but slippery melody sung by Kaplan and swaddled in warmly resonant vibrato-heavy guitar that teeters between squealing and shimmering, with propulsive ba-ba-ba backing vocals and kicking rhythms. On the EP and live the band delivered a skeletal acoustic take, with Hubley’s vocals supplanting the original version’s sonic density. “Blue Line Swinger” is a dramatic epic that swells with slow-building, powerful conviction on the album; the newer version is truncated, focusing more on the the melody.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/James T. Crump.
