Man Stops Traffic at 17th and K to Demand $200 Million
Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
Judge Throws Out WTU Suit Over Teacher Layoffs
Vegetate to Close at the End of the Month
Morning Roundup: Rain Won't Go Away Edition
The capacity crowd watches as Jesper Eklow of Endless Boogie plays with Yo La Tengo during the first encore. (Francis Chung)
If they’d been born a generation earlier, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley — the husband-and-wife core who founded Yo La Tengo in 1984 — might have worked in the Brill Building and earned a nice living writing hits for people who can actually sing. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and instead they ended up composing their own great American songbook — a 14-album catalog (less compilations, EPs, etc.) that for all its stylistic wanderings has maintained a remarkable standard of quality control.
The trio (James McNew is the third) devoted more than half its 21-song set at a sold-out 9:30 Club Thursday night to tunes from the last three years. They played eight from the just-released Popular Songs, its title a joke in the tradition of Big Star’s #1 Record. It’s another seductive, eminently listenable, probably-not-wholly-necessary album of impeccably crafted fuzz pop.
The show ended stronger than it began. The opener, “Here to Fall”, sounded wan absent the '70s cop-movie strings of its recorded version, and “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” was a tentative mess. But the organ-driven vamp of “Periodically Double or Triple” seemed finally to kick things off in earnest — maybe it was Kaplan’s assaultive organ solo, which he appeared to play with his elbows, that finally shook off the torpor. Or maybe it was just sheer perversity that drove the band to sequence all their attention-grabbing rockers mid-set.
“Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m a Goodkind” (what’s up with these titles, anyway?) built slowly from a lilting drone into an insistent groove to shut down the gig proper, and each of the two encore sets featured a locally-themed cover sung by McNew: Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown” and Half Japanese’s “Firecracker.” After Kaplan mused, “We’ve been playing for, like, four hours!” he and Hubley sent us home with a whispery a cappella version of the Beach Boys’ “Farmer’s Daughter.” Actually, it was about an hour and 45 minutes, but by then they didn't owe us a thing.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
james mcnew is yo la tengo's world renowned bass player.
The name of the third bandmember is James McNew. Schramm left the band in the early 90s.
How was the opening band? I got there right in time for YLT to start. The uncomfortable looks from the 95% of people who weren't there for the long jams were priceless.