The Grain

Whenever I’m disheartened with the musical world, I think of Yo La Tengo. Over the last 30 years, the post-punk art rock continuum has gradually been deteriorating into a watered-down, ideologically bankrupt version of its radical original self. By 2007 Sonic Youth were gearing up to release their latest record via Starbucks; by 2009, Iggy Pop’s cadaverous torso would be besmirching billboards all over the UK as part of an ad campaign for Inside Line car insurance (a big part of me still refuses to believe that this last sentence describes an empirically verifiable fact).

But somehow, thankfully, through all this, Yo La Tengo’s progressive, principled, art music trajectory has been unwavering. Indeed, perhaps partially because of this backdrop of sell-out and creative atrophy among their peers, the Hoboken, New Jersey three-piece seemed to attain to an unlikely artistic peak this decade, with a run of career-highlight releases, and a comprehensively brilliant twentieth-anniversary retrospective in the form of 2004’s Prisoners of Love anthology.

One of my pet theories about musical creativity is that, to be truly successful at creating sound, you have to have some kind of deep understanding of the other thing, some kind of awareness of (and respect for) silence. This kind of sensibility is something Yo La Tengo have in spades, and I think this is part of the reason they seemed to come into their own in this decade of hyperbole and noise. 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, is (from the title downwards) an encapsulation of this dedication to subtlety and restraint, the power of silence, the possibilities of nothingness. It might take a while for the first-time listener to appreciate this unique approach to music-making, but once it clicks there’s no turning back, no return to the sledgehammer obviousness and lurid musical sensationalism of Zutonland. Read the rest of this entry »