Yo La Tengo: Fearless, But Harmless
Yo La Tengo’s latest record is confrontationally titled I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. Last night at the 9:30 Club, they did seem like a band unafraid, comfortable in their skin, and enjoying being on the road again. Whether or not they’re going to beat anyone’s ass is less certain, even just musically.
The set was heavy on new material. During one of the band's few audience interactions during the main set, Ira Kaplan joked that only with the six bonus tracks on the 8-track release of the new record could anyone get an idea of where the band was really at; the 77 minutes on the record just wasn't a full picture. The point is, even without those fictional bonus tracks, there were plenty of new songs to cover. Unfortunately, much of the new record seemed to fall a little flat in a live setting. It was not for lack of enthusiasm on the band’s part. But particularly during the mellower songs, the room seemed to take on a restless air, and people started casting glances around them rather than at the band. Even when they were paying attention to the stage, if one looked down into the audience from the balcony, one might as well have been looking at a crowd recreation at Madame Tussaud’s. Aside from the occasional bobbing head, there was a remarkable lack of movement even for a town renowned for its concert stoicism.
Photos by Kyle Gustafson. More photos after the jump.
When the band was playing the straightforward, smart rock it made its name on, they were great. Unfortunately, those moments seemed far too few and far between. They opened strong with the sweetly melodic Belle & Sebastian tinged “The Weakest Part”. Rather inexplicably, they then segued into the epic “Story of Yo La Tango” (misspelling intentional), which clocks in at nearly 12 minutes on record. Here it was stretched out into a slow-building spacey jam well over 15 minutes long. It’s a show closing sort of a song, yet the band trotted it out before anyone had really even settled into the set. Let it be said that it’s to Yo La Tengo’s credit that they’re still brave enough to try anything like this at all, let alone in such an oddball place in the set; when R.E.M. had reached this point in their history they were already headed firmly toward the narcotic irrelevance of Around the Sun. But how well they pull off material like this is questionable.
In the show’s brighter moments, YLT reminded everyone why they’ve been around so long. They’re a band that has always worn their influences proudly. It’s easy to pick them out: one moment you’ll swear they’ve found a lost Creedence track, and they’ll segue suddenly into something that sounds suspiciously like ELO before blasting you back against the wall with an all-out Sonics garage revival. Their skill is in avoiding becoming known only as Hoboken’s best cover band (though through their WFMU appearances, they are that, too), by creating something new out of all that encyclopedic music knowledge. This shone through on Tuesday night in fits and starts, but was largely obscured by the band’s more self-indulgent side, the meandering material that never quite engaged the audience.
