It's always a special night when Yo La Tengo play in town, and it's especially special when they come to town as a quartet, playing largely unplugged, with bassist James McNew even learning how to play upright bass just for this tour.
Yo La Tengo had an particularly lovely stage for this show, adorned with various art works, including random portraits, some album covers, and a cheerful picture by Jad Fair (Half Japanese) of a cat eating a bird.
So the basic premise of this tour is Yo La Tengo playing in support of their new album Stuff Like That There, covering songs by others and reworking earlier Yo La Tengo songs in an acoustic setting, a similar approach as their 1990 album, Fakebook, even including Dave Schram, the guest guitarist from that album, along on the tour ("It only took us 25 years to get Dave on tour with us," Ira Kaplan quipped at one point during the set).
It worked wonderfully. Yo La Tengo seem to delight in mesmerizing their audience, luring them in with lovely instrumentation and then spacing them out with long interludes that you don't even realize were long until you're so deep into it you don't want it to ever stop. At least that's their effect on me.
Kaplan, who can be a fierce guitarist at times, played acoustic throughout, while Schram played very gentle and restrained electric and lap steel guitars. The magic was in the interplay between the musicians, from McNew's lyrical bass lines, to Georgia Hubley's intricate brushwork on cymbals and snare (she played standing the whole time, with no bass drum), to the give-and-take between the two guitars. Of particular note was the reworking of YLT's guitar freakout Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind from 2006's I'm Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, with McNew's familiar and insistent bass line supporting some tasty lap-steel playing while Kaplan's vocals were for once audible on this song ("Slide, slide, slide down the waterslide," etc).
The audience was pin-drop quiet throughout the performance - no loud, chatty drunks last night harshing the mellow vibe of the band.
Nice guys: at one point, Kaplan noticed someone in the audience with a show poster, and without any prompting offered to have the band autograph it for him. They did, to the applause of the rest of the audience.
During last night's wonderful two-set performance (there was no warm-up act), Yo La Tengo covered everyone from Sun Ra to The Lovin' Spoonful to The Cure, with a Johnny Cash cover to close their encore. They played several songs from Fakebook and otherwise covered songs from throughout their lengthy discography. Set list below.
The set was a strong contender for Concert of the Year, but so was the Godspeed You! Black Emperor show from two weeks ago and both of this year's Algiers sets. How many Concerts of the Year can one go to in one year?
Set One
What Can I Say? (from Fakebook)
Stockholm (from I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One)
Rickety (from Stuff Like That There)
My Heart's Not In It (Darlene McRea cover)
How To Make A Baby Elephant Float (from Summer Sun)
What Comes Next (from Facebook)
Somebody's In Love (Sun Ra cover )
Automatic Doom (Special Pillow cover)
Double Dare (from Painful)
The Ballad Of Red Buckets (from Electr-o-pura)
Song For You (your guess is as good as mine; not the Donnie Hathaway/Leon Russel song)
Set Two
Friday I'm In Love (The Cure cover)
The Summer (from Fakebook)
Butchie's Tune (Lovin' Spoonful cover)
A Mile Away (?)
I Can Feel The Ice Melting (Parliments cover)
Naples (Antietam cover)
Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind (from I'm Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass)
Feelin' Low (Ernie Chaffin cover)
Tom Courtenay (from Electr-o-pura)
Griselda (from Fakebook)
Ohm (from Fade)
Our Way To Fall (from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out)
? (Johnny Cash cover)
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