For practically 40 years, Yo La Tengo have been carrying on one of many nice conversations in rock & roll historical past, welcoming us into their little idyll of pastoral noise, mumbled epiphanies, and elegant cowl track selections. Even a diehard fan may battle to go a multiple-choice examination the place you must match an inventory of their track titles with the album they had been on, however that sense of familiarity and fidelity imbues each new launch with the sensation of checking in with outdated pals. What’s extra, their consideration to element implies that each LP all the time has its personal subtly distinctive character.
This Silly World — their first LP of latest songs since 2018’s There’s a Riot Going On, and second since 2013’s Fade — has a temper that makes it really feel distinct of their catalog. As its title implies, it’s brazenly downcast, tinged with pictures of mortality and the battle to make one thing out of no matter time we’ve got whereas we’re right here. “Put together to die/Put together your self whereas there’s nonetheless time,” Ira Kaplan sings like an indie-rock grim reaper on “Till it Occurs,” a tetchy acoustic track with a droning organ that appears like a well mannered warning siren. The seven-minute album opener “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” named after a avenue within the band’s birthplace of Hoboken, New Jersey, is equally unsettled, directly violent and wonderful, like it will possibly’t resolve which of these impulses to belief, as Kaplan sings “I see clearly the way it ends/I see the moon rise because the solar descends.” On “Fallout,” they pile on opaque droning magnificence in a manner that’s been second-nature to them for ages, however when Kaplan sings, “It makes me sick, what’s in my thoughts/It’s so onerous to react in time,” what may be a pleasant autumnal zone-out begins feeling just like the sound of individuals coming tastefully unglued. That track is adopted by bassist James McNew‘s “Tonight’s Episode,” a sardonic psychedelic name and response about shedding your thoughts and doing yo-yo tips that’s one of many extra bracingly odd issues they’ve ever launched.
Yo La Tengo have all the time finished a pleasant job of enjoying with depressive rock idioms. Certainly one of their first basic songs, 1989’s “Drug Take a look at,” was a Neil Youngian picture of apathy that turned the phrase “I hate feeling the way in which I really feel in the present day” right into a drowsily anthemic chorus; extra lately there was “Shades of Blue,” a sweetly bummed track that appeared like Velvet Underground doing a blue-eyed soul ballad. It’s onerous to consider a formative sad-guy icon they haven’t lined sooner or later — from John Cale to Ray Davies to Roky Erickson to Robert Smith to Alex Chilton. However on This Silly World, the forlorn atmosphere is extra lived-in and close-to-home than it’s ever appeared previously.
That sensibility offers every part right here just a little extra urgency. The hulking noise-mantra title observe turns into a needed train in brain-emptying, their voices becoming a member of collectively to drift in shy ecstasy in opposition to the music’s meditative inward-driving grind. Drummer Georgia Hubley has sung many gradual, fragile acoustic songs over time, however her vocal on “Aselestine” has an unguarded endurance that makes it amongst her most transferring performances. They finish with the lengthy, unusual “Miles Away,” which has a surprisingly harsh digital beat and an ideal stability of wintry sonics and looking out melody. “You’re feeling alone/Mates are all gone,” Hubley sings, ushering us into tomorrow’s impending doom with matter-of-fact tenderness. We’re all going to wind up there sometime. A document like this makes easing in the direction of the abyss really feel rather less painful.
