Skip to main content
By Corbin Smith
On Nov. 18, Ya La Tengo—The Greatest Living American Indie Rock Band (Have-Never-Broken-Up Division)—was in town with a different kind of show than their normal skronka-donkfest. Billed as "An Evening with Yo La Tengo," the audience were in seats at Revolution Hall, the P.A. turned to a stately "6" or so, with all four ensemble members (Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, James McNew, and special guest lead guitarist Dave Schramm) standing downstage with acoustic instruments and playing an abnormally large number of cover songs. The band's new record, Stuff Like that There, is an album of reworkings, of others' work as well as their own, recorded 25 years after—but in similar conditions to—their last album of reworkings, Fakebook. A cover of a cover album, of sorts.
One imagines, while enjoying a brief bit of banter on the difficulties of tuning a double bass, a weekly variety show where Yo La Tengo regales the world with covers from every portion of the world pop music songbook in a comfortable, oh, let's say, ocean liner-type setting. Working title: "Yo La Tengo and Friends On a Boat!" With American Idol ending, I can't think of a show more primed to slip into the heart and the pocketbook of the American consumer.
Their takes on Darlene McCrea's "My Heart's Not In It" and the Parliaments' "I Can Feel the Ice Melting," a pair of factory-pop songs, were simple and elegant in the hall, but without sacrificing any of the awkward, stumbling charm of the originals. It is impossible to improve on Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone," but it was lovely to hear in Hubley's distinctive affect, even if she botched a line at the end. The same went for a by-the-numbers take on "Friday I'm In Love." If you played the original and the cover back-to-back for someone who has literally never heard pop music, they might assume that the Cure's more ragged version was a take on YLT'd songcrafty original.
The band's own music also sounded fabulous and warm. "Deeper Into Movies" and "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind," a pair of all-time YLT shoegazey classics, sound more flowerbed-y coming out of acoustic instruments. Schramm's guitar solo in "Ohm" was a shredder, as face-melting as you could possibly get in a show where everyone could feasibly be drinking cocoa if it were given to them. The way Kaplan and Hubley's voices bounce off each other in "Double Dare" remains a singular delight, though I have to confess that I preferred the stripped-to-nothing version from last year's show at the Wonder Ballroom."Our Way to Fall" sounded more like my mental version of the original than the original, somehow.
"Autumn Sweater" closed out the first set. (There were two, about an hour each, and an encore that featured the recently departed Allen Toussaint's "Holy Cow.") It seemed, at first, like it was a fully conventional reworking, a guy-with-a-guitar version of a song built in studio out of an organ drone. But at the bridge, something awesome happened: everyone stopped playing chords and started lightly tapping their instruments, very nearly simulating the structure of the original—a novel and creative rework of a song they've played a thousand times before, born from a group of restless, tinkering musicians who labor at the subtle art of re-doing songs over and over to make something different come out of them.
0 of 4
Willamette Week