I’m far from an authority on New York via New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo, a band that pretty much defines the blueprint for indie rock innovation and longevity. For nearly forty years the have earned a reputation as one of the world’s consummate bands, building a catalog of artistic consistency by shifting their sound over time, expanding their palette album after album. Over the course of eighteen or nineteen albums (really depends on how you count them), the band have made distortion soaked noise pop, krautrock, and plenty of gentle and dreamy experimental indie. They’ve touched upon near everything else in the process, from instrumental records and wonderfully strange collaborations to covers records and meditative atmospherics. It’s entirely possible for someone to love a handful of their albums where others might not connect (though you have to respect the resulting trail of experimentation). With several records considered to be generational classics, it would appear that 38 years into their existence, they just might have released another one with their latest, This Stupid World.
There’s an adventurous sense of freedom to the record that comes hurtling out from the start on the dissonant and motorik glisten of “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” a song that feels like a peek into the trio’s jam sessions. Building in no particular rush to actually get anywhere, Yo La Tengo are scrapping the paint from the walls in the process. They do have destinations in sight though, and as masters of their craft, even their expansive reaches waste no time. Repetition becomes key, setting the atmosphere only to bring us elsewhere is an important part of the journey, highlighted on songs like the harmonically rich “Fallout” and the hypnotic pulse of “Tonight’s Episode” (an effortless live classic in the making). There’s a whole world out there to explore though (a stupid world at that), and Yo La Tengo dip into beautiful folk (“Aselestine”), silky lounge charm (“Until It Happens”), sonic discordance (“Brain Capers,” “This Stupid World”), and well… they’ve never sounded better in the process.