at a glance...

Hometown: Hoboken, NJ
Year Formed: 1984

Members:
Ira Kaplan -guitar, keyboards, drums, vocals
Georgia Hubley -drums, guitar, keyboards, vocals
James McNew -bass, guitar, drums, keyboards, vocals
with:
Susie Ibarra, percussion
Kris Gillespie, drum programming
Tim Harris, David Henry -cello

Bands In The Family:
The Schramms, Dump

Notes:
When Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley founded Yo La Tengo they probably didn't intend to turn into America's best rock band, it just turned out that way. They went through innumerable line-ups before settling on the trio of Kaplan, Hubley, and McNew in 1992, and since then extensive tours and a string of consistently excellent albums have boosted them to the top of the heap.

What does nothing look like when you turn it inside out? Pretty empty, I imagine, and that emptiness is reflected in the icy loneliness that infuses many of the songs on this gorgeously melancholy record. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, who split the lead vocal chores, sing their graceful melodies with an understatement that well serves their tales of relationships collapsing and being reborn.

Yo La Tengo aren't a band to stand still, and their first album in three years is quite a departure from anything else they've done. Over the course of thirteen songs and seventy-seven minutes they only rock out once, on the molar-loosening rave-up "Cherry Chapstick." The rest of the time they stick to mid-tempo grooves and hushed ballads dressed up in dreamy keyboards and liquidly reverberant guitars.

This is easily their most rhythmic album; each track is adorned with ravishingly detailed layers of echoing electronic and acoustic percussion. Previous albums have been graced with covers of songs by the Kinks and Only Ones - this time they do a percolating take of disco majordomo George McRae's "You Can Have It All." What's constant is Yo La Tengo's mastery at turning out indelible and deeply personal music.

If you like Yo La Tengo, check out:
Jad Fair and Yo La Tengo Strange But True
Yo La Tengo Little Honda
The Schramms Dizzy Spell

-- Bill Meyer

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