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Album Review
by SashaS
7-4-2003
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| Yo La Tengo: 'Summer Sun' in springtime |
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Yo La Tengo: 'Summer Sun'
(Matador)
Yo La Tengo: sonics à la carte de toujours
Yo La Tengo’s ‘Summer Sun’ starts quietly with an ambient-setting instrumental, ‘Beach Party Tonight’, that defines the whole aural experience. This trio of Yanksters are on their 12th album and during their long, and generally low profile, career have crisscrossed many a genre. This one is pop music of an extraordinary breeding.
It is sonically economical and elegant, beautiful and subliminal that spreads plethora of colorific tones: from the desert vastness of ‘Little Eyes’, contained in a wistful sounding guitar over a chucking rock-phrase, via the cellar-darkness of mumbled ‘Nothing But You And Me’ to the post-party time open-terrace music of a seaside resort on ‘Seasons Of The Shark’ that turns out to be a refuge for recovering psychedelics…
‘Summer Sun’ is icy, detached, aloof, like a mirage, hovering within one’s perception and somehow remaining out of reach. The disc invites so many revisits because it feels like a developing addiction due to its fine knack to get these sketchy melodies speared through one’s eardrums. Ira Kaplan sounds like a whispering Lou Reed, Georgia Hubley more like Nico. The Velvet Underground, as well as Sun Ra, Beach Boys and, even, Neu!, may be pointed as inspirations but the truth is that they are above it.
YLT do not reconstruct but simply misalign elements to become something else, fashion a different perspective. ‘Tiny Birds’ is so minimalistic that it verges on silent and, when you reckon you pegged the band down (for this album, at least), ‘Georgia Vs. Yo La Tengo’ appears like a funky little mutha that travels cyber spaces one suspects George Clinton would be on if he were a young man now. Then, there is the 10-minute opus ‘Let’s Be Still’ that is such a concoction of instruments, tempos, breaks, noises, styles, it truly is like a song from a (yet-to-be-made) ‘Being Brian Wilson’ flick. An epic that’s solely worth the price of the album!
For 20 years YLT’s hubby-and-wife partnership of Kaplan and Hubley, with James Doe, have created soundscapes that simply float around you like butterflies in springtime. This album is such an artefact of class and method that will, unfortunately, fail to break out of its dedicated fandom at this time when brash, obvious and undressed ‘musicians’ sell like super-effective neurosis cleansers.
An American would say that this album is neo-surf music for the mind-kind while a Brit would claim it to be the perfect background to a summer’s day in an English garden. A critic suggests it to be the ultimate definition of – cool. And, they all are right. You should do yourself a big favour and come bask in its goodnik rays.
8/10
SashaS
8-5-2003
Yo La Tengo’s album ‘Summer Sun’ is released 07 April 2003 on Matador
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