Yo La Tengo

Yo La Tengo at Buckhead Theater, 2013

Yo La Tengo have this year reissued their sixth studio album, 1993's Painful, as More Painful. The album marked a turning point for the band, and guitarist Ira Kaplan has said, “Anyone who ever said they liked our older records more than Painful, I just told them they’re wrong.” 

Writing in The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones notes. "Yo La Tengo has been around for thirty stubborn years , , , The obvious antecedent of the group, founded in Hoboken, is the Velvet Underground. (Its members—Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew—even played the Underground in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol.)  Yo La Tengo is specifically rooted in the Velvet Underground’s third, eponymous album, in which the delicate and the noisy collapse into each other, and even violent feedback feels soft. Dozens of bands have sprung from this source, including My Bloody Valentine and the Feelies, but Yo La Tengo has never been big on the obscure or the hip side of the Velvets; it votes, repeatedly, for beauty. . . "

"Yo La Tengo has an approachable quality," Frere-Jones continues. "Each year, the band plays a Hanukkah show at Maxwell’s, the Hoboken rock club that was sold in January; there’s none of the haughtiness that surrounds so many of the Underground’s descendants. Kaplan, Hubley, and McNew apply themselves to one of the most common templates in indie rock and consistently get it right: melodies you can remember easily and eruptions of noise that you can’t be sure even happened, with sharp and unadorned language. They’re the cool kids who refuse to act cooler than you."

My favorite Yo La Tango album is probably 2000's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, the first truly great album of this millennium.  The closing number, Night Falls On Hoboken, is quiet and gentle, but is nonetheless one of those songs that, if listened to carefully, has the power to change your life.

Also, Cherry Chapstick, because why not?