Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 3.5 / 5 Reviewer: Lukas Clark-Memler |
As far as album titles go, Popular Songs sounds like a best of compilation, or greatest hits record for some ‘80s new wave band suffering at the hands of our global recession. And in a way Yo La Tengo’s twelfth studio recording possesses a compilation-like feel – a collection of singles per se, with no overall fluidity or togetherness. The listener is confronted with an eclectic selection of songs that jump from genre to genre faster than an iPod on shuffle.
Yo La Tengo seems to delight in rendering its listeners into various states of confusion and alarm, and care little about public approval. Though with Popular Songs, the band seems to be taking a step away from their unstructured, niche sound. However, with the last three tracks making up over half the length of the record (9, 11 and 15 minutes), Popular Songs is hardly your run-of-the-mill, mainstream indie album.
It has been about three years since Yo La Tengo proudly declared I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass; and earlier this year, under the pseudonym Condo Fucks, the band released an obscene, raucous selection of garage rock and lo-fi covers. So it makes sense that most of Popular Songs is mellow and soft. From the Motown-esque ‘Is This It,’ to the dream-pop somnambulism of ‘Avalon or Someone Very Similar,’ Popular Songs showcases Yo La Tengo in a place of relaxation and leisure.
Popular Songs succeeds as Yo La Tengo’s most coherent and listenable release to date. Every track here shares a sense of poignancy and nostalgia – something that comes from a band looking back on a quarter of a century’s career. Will this record appeal to a wider fan base of Yo La Tengo virgins? It’s possible. Will this album completely satisfy Yo La Tengo veterans who have been here since 86’s Ride The Tiger? Most definitely.
