Night Falls on Hoboken

A couple weeks ago I saw Yo La Tengo and Why? Perform at the Loews Theater in Jersey City. I bought tickets to this show months in advance; seeing Yo La Tengo essentially in their hometown in an old movie theater designed like a 19th century opera house isn’t something I’d try to avoid. The theater itself was a huge ornately gilded space with frescoes on the high ceiling. The inside was beautiful; with a two-story foyer complete with a grand sloping staircase and enormous gold chandelier shining on the milling crowd of people below. I was content to find a large portion of this crowd was comprised of aging Gen Xers, pleasantly lacking any of that New York pretension one typically finds at such events.

As the lights dimmed and we took our seats, the opening act, Why?, began to play. They started off with a few staples from their album, Elephant Eyelash (including: “Crushed Bones”, “Fall Saddles”, “Yo Yo Bye Bye”) playing with intensity, but a frustrating feeling of amateurism. Indeed, the band was never quite together; the lead guitar/keyboard would miss notes sporadically and singer Yoni Wolf’s voice was noticeably worse live than in the studio. However, the drummer held the beat with a metronomic sense of time, and Wolf’s impassioned delivery was assuredly commendable. After making it through a couple songs they began to find their groove, and demonstrated some enthusiastic performances of some of my favorite material, including “Gemini (Birthday Song).”

After about 20 minutes they decided to test run some new material, a move which they announced was the result of a certain “Julie’s” wishes. Thanks to Julie, for the rest of the set we all had to endure some fairly uninspired and affected sounding material, with a few of the band’s less captivating older songs thrown in. The new songs lacked the oddly endearing charm that made Elephant Eyelash so good. The attempt to replicate the unexpected and quirky, yet strangely powerful metaphors, and colloquial plays on words found on their debut album, just fell short in the newer songs. I did enjoy seeing them, but they clearly need a little more practice on the road.

Yo La Tengo opened with “Sugarcube” to an eruption of applause; at which point I could have left the concert satisfied. For the next half hour they jammed out the distortion, rolling and rollicking along à la Sister Ray. They toned it down a bit in the middle of their set to play some of their new material off their newly released album, I’m not afraid of You and I will Beat Your Ass. Lead singer/guitarist Ira Kaplan traded in his guitar for a piano on these numbers that might be construed as an evolution of the soft-synth and vocal tracks that they do so well. But the newer songs, although pleasant, seemed to me a little bit too much in the vein of the pretty pop found in Belle and Sebastian’s newer material, which doesn’t really moved past its purely aesthetic value.

Every once in a while Yo La Tengo would slip back into their earlier sound, jamming an old ditty into a 20 minute noisy epic; and with 20+ years of experience under their belt, they do it well. At this point they’re old hands at this game, and they put to shame any contemporary bands’ attempts to replicate the same aesthetic. Moe Tucker allusions aside, drummer Georgia Hubley’s simplicity complements the band well, and with James McNew’s consistent bass and keyboard, they provide the perfect sonic background for Ira Kaplan’s distortion soaked noodlings.

Unfortunately, the experience was slightly diminished by the fact that the venue required everyone in the audience to remain seating. This aspect didn’t appear to phase the slightly more advanced in age crowd, but for my friends in I, the general consensus was that watching Yo La Tengo calls for a more energetic and sweaty communal experience than was allowed for. In my opinion, however, the impressive musical performance that Yo La Tengo gave was the determining factor. By the end of the show, while I watched Ira Kaplan scraping his guitar into a beautiful cacophonic climax, I had forgotten entirely about any annoyances caused by my sitting down.

I'd reccommend "Cherry Chapstick" by Yo La Tengo off of their album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-out.

John and Tony