Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

After twenty plus years of making music breaking new ground is not to be expected. Yo La Tengo is no exception to this rule. By this point in their career they have mastered their sound, varied though it may be, and in general we know what to expect from the Hoboken trio. 2006’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass was a mixed bag and showed the band at their most fun and spontaneous. However, it lacked a kind of cohesion in feeling previous albums such as And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-out and I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One captured so well. In that sense Popular Songs is a return to writing songs that genre-hop but still manage to keep that cohesive feeling.

The album opens with Here to Fall, a song that starts off sparse using only the bleep of a lonely synthesizer, recalling their soundtrack work The Sounds of the Sounds of Science before the drums kick in with full-force followed by a copious amount of heavily-layered strings. Make no mistake, even though this album harkens back to some of their earlier work the production itself, for the most part, pulls away from the bare-bones approach of previous albums and instead has a more densely layered feel. This is especially apparent on the Motown sounding If It’s True which appropriates it’s opening from the classic Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch and features an adorable trade-off vocal by Ira and Georgia.

Popular Songs ends with a trio of epic, meditative songs that capture the mood of nostalgia so succinctly that listening to these instrumental tracks evokes memories of old friends long gone. Yo La Tengo has just proved they have more heart than any other band, and Popular Songs may just be their best effort to date.