'This Stupid World' by Yo La Tengo
As the members of Yo La Tengo get older—guitarist Ira Kaplan is now 66, drummer (and Kaplan’s wife) Georgia Hubley 62, and bassist James McNew 53—the New Jersey indie-rock band has allowed its experimentalism to grow shaggier and warmer. Its 17th studio long-player, This Stupid World, is an intimate head trip.
It’s not sudden intimacy: listeners can find their own access points into “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” which opens the LP with about seven and a half minutes of loose-limbed psychedelic punk, Kaplan murmuring and Hubley harmonizing with the murmur as Kaplan lays guitar spikes and reverberations across the steady pulse Hubley and McNew generate.
The other eight songs are similarly loose-limbed, if stylistically varied. “Aselestine” turns Hubley into a tender lead singer and carries on the romantic melancholy of 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One; “Tonight’s Episode” finds McNew pleasantly bragging about yo-yo tricks within a genteel soul jam; and the title track grinds down on primitivism smartly enough to earn the band another passel of Velvet Underground comparisons.
Sonic Youth comparisons would be more apt, because, like that now-defunct band, Yo La Tengo has aged toward less noisy, more ruminative tracks like “Fallout” and “Until It Happens”; the latter could plausibly be presented as Ira Kaplan’s version of No Wave pioneer Arto Lindsay’s bossa nova elegance during the 1990s.
The trio still conjures up rock ‘n’ roll spirits: a mingling of the beachside and the Mysterians on “Brain Capers,” a touch of Americana and light feedback amid the contrition of “Apology Letter.” The spirits simply move Yo La Tengo, or Yo La Tengo moves the spirits, in different ways now. Kaplan, Hubley, and McNew refuse to pretend they’re young and refuse to pretend they’re done.
