Throwing Out the Book on Pop Success
Yo La Tengo
The Starfish Room
Vancouver, B.C.
Thursday, June 5, 1997
Review by Marilee Breitkreutz
Photography by Rodney Gitzel
Experiencing Yo La Tengo live is a bit like eating peanut brittle:
it doesn't look like it should taste very good, but when that
first bite dissolves into crunchy sweetness inside your mouth,
you can't help but become positively hooked. This trio from Hoboken,
New Jersey has ignored the mandates of the How to Make It
Big as a Pop Band manual, such as "costumes and on-stage
antics are an indispensable component of the successful live act"
or "it has been proven that an appealing or provocative image
sells records." When they played to a sold-out Starfish Room
recently, Yo La Tengo proved that, despite their nondescript appearance
and presence, they can easily sustain the rapt attention of a
live audience with their music -- a brand of pop which
is rare for its combination of sincerity, maturity and originality.
Calling a Yo La Tengo show a 'sonic experience,' though it would
be slightly melodramatic, would not be inaccurate. Hypnotic stretches
of their trademark sound -- waves of meticulously controlled feedback
washing over moody keyboards and crashing drums -- give way in
the next song to a pure, simple melody. Songs like "Sugarcube"
and "Autumn Sweater" confirm Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan
and James McNew as indie-pop virtuosos; mellow and meditative
songs such as "Blue Line Swinger" and "Shadows"
lull the crowd into pensive bliss, and more upbeat tracks like
"Double Dare" and the newer "Deeper into Movies"
have the audience bouncing. Playing quite a few songs from their
latest release, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, the
band also lays out an impressive smorgasbord of tracks from previous
albums. The performance is marred only by the unfortunate fact
that Georgia is on drum duty all night and her beautiful vocals
are hampered either by poor sound or, more likely, by the difficulty
involved in singing and playing the drums at the same time.
However, the Starfish Room audience is delighted and calls the
band back for two encores before the show is over. Afterwards,
the band sticks around onstage to chat with fans, well-wishers
and hangers-on. Ira jumps off of the stage to talk to a fan who
has a question about guitar gear, and James and Georgia are busy
handing out autographs and smiles. Exceedingly accessible, throughout
the show the band had interacted with the audience by taking requests
and generally making us feel like we were not just fans, but guests
at a Yo La Tengo rehearsal session. Then they staggered us with
their incredible creativity, making us happy that we had only
had to pay fifteen bucks to see them at work.
Certainly Yo La Tengo have improved musically since back in 1985,
when John Petric of The Columbus Dispatch gave one of their
first 7" releases the "AAA rating -- awful, awful, awful."
Now many observers are touting them as the next pop sensations.
What they certainly are is one of the most interesting
and unpretentious bands around, and the perfect antidote for
image-oriented-pop-sodden ears.
First published in Drop-D Magazine on June 20, 1997
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