Yo La Tengo

There's a novel by Robert Schneider that anyone who loves music should read. It's called "The Sound of Music" ("Le voci del mondo" in the original), set in a 19th-century Austrian village, and it tells the story of Elias Alder, a strange creature to whom the universe granted a gift as terrible as it is wondrous: the ability to perceive the most hidden sounds of the Earth, the intimate breath of living beings, the rhythmic entrails of every natural element, and to transfigure them into organ sonatas capable of enchanting, and often moving, even the meanest of people. About halfway through the book, we find these words: "Who knows what people are looking for! They move from one lover to another, not knowing that God assigned them, from eternity, one single person: the one whose heart beats in unison with their own." Making the heart beat in unison is first and foremost the prerogative of love, but also of music. Which, often enough, are one and the same thing. If there has ever been a single band capable of interpreting this sonic and carnal mysticism, this ontological and anatomical recognition of what we are listening to, this exclusive assignment of our destiny to a spiritual counterpart made of our own blood, that band undoubtedly answers to the name of Yo La Tengo. The purity and innocence that, too hastily, we had already given up for dead.

Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley are us: our dreams held together with spit and whispers, the smile of a teenager thrown into an adult's body, nights spent over a beer with old friends, days spent in record stores with the wide eyes of a child. Ira and Georgia met exactly like that, wandering around record stores and the New York clubs where their favorite bands played. They met in the late Seventies, and hit it off. Worn down by the frenzy of the Big Apple, they soon moved to the quieter, cheaper town of Hoboken, New Jersey, which - although it didn't offer the same distractions as Manhattan - did have (and still has!) Maxwell's Tavern, an indie enclave on whose stage bands like Feelies and dB's used to perform. Ira and Georgia struck up a friendship with the club's owner, Steve Fallon, and started helping out with organizing the evening shows, until in 1984 they decided it was time to get up on that stage themselves.

They chose a bizarre name, light years away from the imagery of the alternative bands of the era, and in a Romance language – Spanish – that gave no hint at all of their North American origins. It was actually an expression borrowed from baseball, specifically from Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacon of the New York Mets – the team Ira and Georgia are die-hard fans of – to whom teammates would shout "Yo la tengo" instead of the usual "I got it", to let him know they'd caught the ball and avoid possible collisions.

Under this exotic name, Ira and Georgia debuted in 1986 with a record – "Ride The Tiger" – of post-punk-tinged jangle-pop in the vein of Rem and Mission Of Burma, but it was in the Nineties that Yo La Tengo found their own dimension, one that – thanks to the spirit of the times – matched perfectly with the dimension of an entire decade. Their records from those years can never be neatly filed under any of the genres that defined that fabulous musical period, but the poetics and essence, the attitude and immediacy, bear the unmistakable mark of an epoch in which even perfect outsiders could find themselves, for a moment, on top of the world. This never happened to Ira and Georgia – who in the meantime had recruited essential bassist James McNew, finding the final piece of the alchemy – simply because it couldn't have happened. Not because of the deadly self-righteousness that the indie universe sometimes succumbs to, but because of the intimate nature of their music. After all, Yo La Tengo had opened the decade with an album of nothing but covers ("Fakebook", 1990), performed with the enthusiasm of kids playing their idols' songs in a basement. Armed with that same enthusiasm, and joined by new producer Roger Moutenot, within five years they dropped a trio of albums each better than the last (a poker hand if you count the intimate, nocturnal "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out", though that came in 2000): "Painful", "Electr-O-Pura" and this "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One", which is the best of the bunch for the simple reason that it contains everything the American band had been and a good chunk of what they had yet to become.

So for every "We're An American Band" – which recklessly ventures into the distortion-laced oceans already explored by "I Heard You Looking" and "Blue Line Swinger" – there's a "Green Arrow" adrift along some desolate route, with an orchestra of crickets marking its path and a slide guitar silencing the desert. Likewise, if the abrasive roar of "Deeper Into Movies" descends from the windswept energy of "Double Dare", conversely the incipient bass and oblique drums of "Damage" foreshadow the twilight of the following album, where the Can of "Future Days" will sigh at the moon rising over Hoboken. And finally, where "Sugarcube" – echoing "Tom Courtenay" – swallows a dreamy melody in an emotional cyclone of feedback, "Shadows" instead leaves it bare, sheltered only by the stars.

The price to pay is an inevitable lack of formal unity, made up for, however, by an unrivaled underlying coherence. The sixteen songs on the album could belong to sixteen different bands, each one immanent in the other fifteen. In other words, the considerable stylistic variety running through the tracklist can still be reduced to a common denominator: the Yo La Tengo trademark, something intangible and inexplicable to anyone who's never listened to them. No analytical inquiry can trace it back to any structural element. And yet, that entity is graspable on first listen if you know the band's sound – or rather, if you recognize yourself in it.

For this reason, "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" needs to be decoded starting from raw feeling rather than traditional exegetical frameworks. Never more than here does the call of instinct prevail over any methodology, since no discipline can explain to us why that particular thing, and only that thing, manages to pick the locks of our soul and make us fall in love. Then again, it would be obtuse to try to confine such a multifaceted, rich album within a defined genre. Inside it there's shoegaze, noise, a garage attitude, a tendency toward crossover in the most absolute sense, yet it is precisely none of these things. It comes across instead as a miscellany of styles and musical trends in vogue in the Nineties, from the madchester sound transplanted to the other side of the Atlantic (the single "Autumn Sweater", which for once dethrones the electric guitar's supremacy in favor of keyboards and festive polyrhythms) to the Jayhawks struck by lightning from J Mascis (the folk-rock ballad "Stockholm Syndrome" with McNew's bent vocals), from Bacharach set within structures alien to Stereolab ("Moby Octopad") to the psych-kraut delirium of "Spec Bebop", in which the Oneida seem to be foreshadowed.

On the margins of this adorable scrapbook, there remain the mischievous cover of the Beach Boys' "Little Honda" – fittingly filtered through Jesus & Mary Chain territory – and "Center Of Gravity", a burst of bossa nova that's surprising only to those unaware of the boundless music-obsession of people who, before being musicians, have always been omnivorous listeners. This is confirmed by the seductive closer "My Little Corner Of The World". Another cover, this time of a song written in the Sixties by Lee Pockriss and Bob Hilliard for Anita Bryant. Georgia Hubley sings it, as ever, with infinite grace and tenderness, reaffirming that the Yo La Tengo trademark is something genuinely perceptible and yet utterly intangible. Perhaps it can be described with the lines printed inside the booklet: "I can hear the roar of the Ocean. And finally, I can hear the Music of love". The roar of the ocean and the music of love. That's it, that's what Yo La Tengo is. And some days – that is, every day – nothing else is needed.

For those whose heart beats in unison with the music they listen to.

Ride the wave of great music

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17/01/2016