via Ragged Words:
by Daniel Greenwood
Experience is on Yo La Tengo’s side, with this New Jersey trio of Ira Kaplin, Georgia Hubley and James McNew having ploughed through the 1990s and now seeing out the 2000s with another very good record. The band have dropped at least one great album in each of the past two decades: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One(1996) and Suddenly Everything Turned Itself Inside Out (2000). This is definitely a band you can rely on. And with Popular Songs, that stance hasn’t changed.
Opener ‘Here to Fall’ feels like a more contained and therefore volatile Yo La Tengo epic, with a cinematic orchestra ducking and diving as Ira Kaplin declares ‘I know you’re worried/I’m worried too’. Popular Songs has a throw-away feel to it, laid back and loose, but not in the melancholy way that Suddenly Everything is. Maybe it feels like the hard work is behind this band. Though, that’s not to say they don’t work hard, evidently they do, but the band’s craft is effortless and refined.
The first nine tracks make up a Pop record, and that’s clearly something intentional, because the final three songs comprise an almost entirely different album. Here’s where the uninitiated might turn the stereo off, or some of the uber-initiated might delete it from their hard drive. Perhaps it’s a trick, with Popular Songs luring the listener into the experience, expecting Beach Boys off-shoots and doo-wop, which there’s plenty of. ‘More Stars than there are in Heaven’ reels you in further, but no hook is forthcoming, instead there’s the near-drone acoustic ambience of ‘The Fireside’. Here Yo La Tengo slip their shoes off and sit back, allowing the looping reverb to melt into the blur somewhere above the song. And, eleven minutes later, the sort of alternative guitar squalor that’s such a fine fixture on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One turns up to slap you in the chops for fifteen minutes. ‘And the Glitter is Gone’, indeed.
Yo La Tengo can do what they like, but then they always have, successful or not they’ve always written honest songs that have proven popular over time. This band are easy to love. But as with the upper tier of Popular Songs, love isn’t so short nor sweet as you might expect.
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