breakbeet's Full Review: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out by Yo La...
One of the finest memories of my childhood was sitting with my two cousins on their back porch. Our parents had been having a yard sale all day. While the adults were folding up plastic tables on the front lawn and resigning 1960s jewelry boxes and 1980s sweaters to green plastic containers once again, we were on the other side of the house sipping Kool Aid. We were maybe ten or eleven and weren't expected to help, so we didn't. People don't expect a lot of you when you're that age, thankfully. You don't have to work really hard. You also don't have to be reserved or intellectual. We weren't talking seriously on that summer evening. We were making jokes that I probably wouldn't even smile at if I heard today. They were hilarious then, though, hilarious the first time you told them, or the second time, ot the third time. Then the fourth or so they'd stop being funny. Until we were apart for four months and one of us brought them up at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Then they'd be eye wateringly funny again.
We couldn't see the sun set as we sat on the back porch that summer evening, but we didn't need to. There was a big pine tree in front of the porch. When you could see the needles on it, you were still in the realm of the cool, comfortable evening. When the tree was replaced with a fifteen foot black blob, you'd better get the hell inside or the mosquitoes would eat you alive. Getting sunburn and mosquito bites in the same day isn't pleasant.
The members of Yo La Tengo are no strangers to a scene such as this, I'm sure. Whether you're from Virginia (Me) or New Jersey (Yo La Tengo) or even New Delhi, everyone has a soothingly cool memory that is the perfect formula of nature, family, and, to use YLT frontman Ira Kaplan's lyrics, "belonging." When you're sitting in at your whitewashed job you ocassionally allow your mind to drift back to this scene. So full of color, so full of life. You're happy it happened and also sad you didn't appreciate how beautiful the sky fading to purple and crickets joining in a chorus at the foundations of every house in the neighborhood was. It wasn't even a childhood-naivety thing. People just don't appreciate the great moments of their life until they're over. Maybe you sitting in your cubicle whose walls are only slightly stiffer than your pressed white shirt will eventually metamorphose into a treasured memory, you ponder. Nah, that's a definite negatory.
Yo La Tengo's ninth studio album is both Romantic and un-Romantic. It definitely paints a tear-jerkingly vivid emotional potrait, but the paints it uses are modest ones. No European symphonies-for-hire here. Not even any additional members. It's still just Ira Kaplan on guitar, his wife Georgia Hubley on drums, and pal James McNew on bass. They strum and drum away just like they did during Yo La Tengo's 1980s genesis behind the quaint walls of the Kaplan/Hubley apartment.
This minimalism was to be expected of the flannel-shirted indie veterans, though. Perhaps what is most shocking is the trio's shelving of their guitars in favor of enough somber organs to stock a Pope's funeral. "Yo La Tengo without six-strings?" you say. "But they're a guitar band. Don't you remember the solo guitar in Electro-Pura's 'My Heart's Reflection'? That mother burrowed into your chest, ripped your heart out, fed it to you on a silver plate, then ripped it out again."
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out's teary-eyed sound doesn't don't so much rip your heart out as it does melt it. You can feel your heart start to drip-drop like a freeze pop left on the kitchen counter as Mrs. Hubley and Mr. Kaplan whisper they're "waiting for a new beginning every day" over immaterial organs. Later Hubley coos that "tears are in your eyes" and you realize your heart is a sticky-sweet puddle. Then the classic Kaplan noise-pop guitar heats things up with 'Cherry Chapstick' and your puddle of slush evaporates. Your heart is a red sticky cloud floating a couple hundred feet above you, and man does it feel good.
Did YLT case their strings because they had a somber, mauve-tinted masterpiece in mind, or because they were bored with their instruments, thought their audience was bored with them, or both? What I'm trying to say is 'Was this album an act of intention or a beautiful accident?' It's really not worth pondering. Yo La Tango released a stellarly somber album with ATNTIIO, whatever the means.
Notice the inclusion of the term 'album'. Electro-Pura and the well-respected I Can Feel The Heart Beating As One were awesome, but they were an amazing medley of sonic rockers. Scratch one track off I Can Feel the Heart Beating As One and you lose roughly 1/16 of the album. ATNTIIO has that sleek continuty that characterizes rock's greatest albums. Take almost any track out and the album just collapses completely like a Jinga tower. Without 'Every Day', 'Our Way To Fall' is a bland page from a (and I say it with the utmost pride) beta-male's journal. The spine chilling album intro track keeps tension heavy in the album's air, though, sort of like that openning vignette a CSI episode when you see the lesbian prostitutes murdered by a faceless guy with a steak knife, and 'Our Way To Fall' turns into an awesome track, the perfect blend of cuddliness and creepiness.
Playing on the radio airwaves just after a ten year old Pavement track, 'You Can Have It All' is a great toe-tapper. Played after the manic depressive first six tracks of ATNTIIO, though, it's a sunshinefest that makes you want to rip all your clothes off and go sprinting across your front lawn. (The author of this review does not encourage this and is not liable for any legal penalties and/or dirty looks incurred while performing such activities.)
I could go keep on and on with mediocre descriptions of the heave-hauling orgy YLT locked these tracks in, but that would probably be a waste of your time. Albums like ATNTIIO are there to assure us time is indeed a precious thing. Though often the world looks a grey globby mess, if you look a little deeper, you'll see everything has its unique beauty. What if you could make your entire life watching one huge glorious sunset? How long would it be before you started begging that motherf^cking orange orb to sink so you could iron your shirt, brush your teeth, flop into bed and wake up for work at 7 sharp? Probably not as long as you'd think. The perfect sunset is about, oh let's see, seventeen minutes and forty two seconds long.
1. Every Day, 6:32: Very Good, Dark, spooky start to the album. Feeble keyboards and a quesy bass riff play off each other as drummer Georgia Hubley whisper-duets with Ira Kaplan."When Monday comes I want want nothing/when Tuesday comes I want the same." 2. Our Way To Fall, 4:18: Good, Ira Kaplan doing a good gawky teenager impression, recounting meeting his sweetheart. 3. Saturday, 4:18: Good, another indie funeral march. Hubley and Kaplan claiming things are out "out of tune" in the chorus. "I sat in front of the film/without really watching/said who's the guy with the gun?/like I was involved." sings Hubley in a verse. 4. Let's Save Tony Orlando's House, 4:59: Good, Bouncy little number about childhood memories of trying to save a friend's burning house. Yo La Tengo fans' minds are probably snapping at this point. Four tracks in and not a lead guitar in sight. The closest they get is the plucky acoustic guitar at the end of this track. 5. Last Days Of Disco, 6:28: Good, a lot like 'Our Way To Fall'. Kaplan monologue about seeing a girl at a party and dancing with her. Not a big party. A small one, maybe twenty people, music on a $100 Radioshack stereo, two bottles of vodka being mixed with Ocean Spray cranberry juice. 6. Crying Lot Of G, 4:45: Good, loungey tune. You could relax if it wasn't for stark marital decline lyrics. "Wonder why we have such trouble cheering each other up sometimes when one of us is down. I look at you and think 'Maybe she knows something I don't. Maybe I should be upset.'" ponders Kaplan. After each set of lyrics he reassures his partner and perhaps himself "stop and remember/it isn't always this way." 7. You Can Have It All, 4:36: Very Good, THE Valentine's Day mix CD track. Kaplan scat vocal sample+simple, raspy Hubley singing+dour cellos instead of electric guitars= mushy merriment to boot. 8. Tears Are In Your Eyes, 4:35: Good, slow ballad that recalls YLT's Americana roots on Fakebook."You tell me you haven't slept in days/you tell me sleeping only makes you tired anyways" sings Hubley. A sad track, but it doesn't gaze at the full bottle of sleeping pills like 'Everyday' or 'Crying Lot Of G'. 9. Cherry Chapstick, 5:31: Very Good, Finally! An alt rocker that shakes down the stadium. Kaplan vicariously ponders having sex with "a girl with cherry chapstick on and nothing more" while in reality the girls "don't look at me when I walk by." 10. From Black To Blue, 4:47: Good, sounds a little like Sonic Youth's 2002 'Empty Pages'. More introspective Kaplan lyrics. 11. Madeleine, 3:37: Good, classic warm-fuzzy Yo La Tengo. 12. Tired Hippo, 4:46: Medium, Awesome track? No. Instrumental B-side banter. Awesome piece of an album? Hell yes. A Latin American lounge tune that once again recalls Fakebook. Beneath the ticking drums and harmonic minor organ riff, though, dwells a feeling of utter exhaustion, of complete dissopation of energy. Death, is what I'm trying to say. 13. Night Falls On Hoboken, 17:42: Good, An acoustic guitar and bass gently clasp hands and go on a twenty minute sound trip. This isn't the sound of rockstars dropping acid that cost enough to put a down payment on a Rolls Royce. This is the sound of a couple kids jamming in their garage all day, then sipping some PBRs as the sun sets.
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