Ben Thompson 

Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There – indie stalwarts stay sneakily wonderful

Though at first you might wonder if the world really needs another lovely Yo La Tengo album, they’ll get you in the end
  
  

Yo La Tengo
They have ways of making you love them: Yo La Tengo. Photograph: Dusdin Condren

A full quarter-century on from 1990’s career-definingly tasteful covers/reboots/new songs selection Fakebook, Ira Kaplan’s Hoboken, New Jersey, indie stalwarts are rejoined by former guitarist Dave Schramm to revisit that surefire methodology. At first, newcomers to Yo La Tengo’s work might find the results irredeemably – even unconscionably – pleasant. Yet over this album’s full running time, there is something magnetically insidious about the way James McNew’s standup bass and Georgia Hubley’s percussion knit together material from sources as diverse as George Clinton and Hank Williams. Does a world that also contains Isis and Donald Trump really need a nuanced folk-rock cover of the Cure’s Friday I’m In Love? The answer to that question appears to be yes.

 

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