In case you forgot why you clicked on the link leading to this article, or were distracted by a Neighborhoodies ad: Prisoners of Love is a retrospective of Yo La Tengo's 18 years of music making, using two CDs to cover both the obvious selections and the things you didn't expect to hear. Hey, there's "Autumn Sweater". Hey, there's the band's first single. Hey, it's a big day coming. Hey, it's a motherfucker. And, hey, it's a third bonus disc with 16 rarities and never-before released tracks! It's like the Kansas Jello mold I never knew I wanted! That is, until I heard Georgia Hubley singing both an acoustic demo of "Tom Courtenay" and a recording of Sun Ra's "Dreaming". Feel free to send back the unrecognizable mulching of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" for a full refund, and keep the rest of the music. Operators are standing by.
Be warned, though-- instead of chronologically progressing through the band's catalog, Prisoners of Love wants the listener to consider Yo La Tengo's body of work as a timeless object, all songs rising from the same fertile ground. It's a disingenuous approach to take, in some respects-- the early early stuff, for the most part, sounds like Springsteen and R.E.M. happening all at once, and it can stick out like a pair of neon Zubaz when set against the assured and confident music the group made once they found themselves.
The one exception to the earnest jangle of the group's salad days is "The Story of Jazz", a track from Yo La Tengo Album #2, New Wave Hot Dogs. It's that album's final track, a pisstakey indie-rock rave-up where Ira Kaplan works out his pigfucker tendencies by name-checking and emulating Steve Albini. "And I saw this band/ Their name escaped me by Thursday/ And the way it happened, looking, look for something to believe in." On this compilation, it's followed by their recently recorded version of Sun Ra's "Nuclear War", wherein the group, dropping f-bombs left and right like they're talking about the weather, sounds a lot meaner and ballsier.
Talking tough was never Yo La Tengo's strong suit, though: Yes, they can sound just fine giving the thrash rock of Dead C a trial run (as they do on their version of "Bad Politics", available on the Kansas Jello mold), but Yo La Tengo is a lover, not a fighter. "Sugarcube", "Little Eyes", "You Can Have It All", "Autumn Sweater", "By The Time It Gets Dark"-- love love love. (Also, check the name of this collection.) Even when Kaplan's head splits open near the end of "Pablo and Andrea", it's all sunshine and lollipops. And when Kaplan sounds most like Thurston Moore (instead of Lou Reed), it's in the service of "Big Day Coming", a song that's unabashedly optimistic and ebullient. In some ways, it could be viewed as an answer to the studied rock-and-roll cynicism of "Teenage Riot"-- "We can play a Stones song, 'Sittin' on a Fence'/ And it'll sound pretty good, 'til I forget how it ends." There's Yo La Tengo's 20 years summarized neatly into two lines.
If there is one problem with Prisoners of Love, it's the wonky pacing. The first four tracks on Disc One-- the mantra-like "Shaker", the organ-haze shimmer of "Sugarcube", the not-so-dull roar of "Barnaby, Hardly Working", and the gently shuffling "Little Eyes"-- are all good in and of themselves, but end up butting heads when laid back-to-back. It's only after the fifth track, "Stockholm Syndrome", that the disc finally seems to start. Also, each disc tosses in the seven-minute Yo La Tengo jam near the end, because every Yo La Tengo disc has the seven-minute jam. The end is also where the covers are dumped-- Disc One's penultimate track is the group's Casiotronic version "You Can Have It All", while Disc Two pulls into the garage with Sandy Denny's "By The Time It Gets Dark" hot on the heels of Sun Ra. And, of course, there's the caveat I offered earlier about the haphazard non-chronological song ordering.
As odd as that approach might seem, it's a fitting way to pay tribute to the group's catch-all aesthetic. Even if the band's main influence is easily pegged (see: the Velvet Underground, if you haven't already), Yo La Tengo is informed by so many other musics (as their choice in covers will attest) that it's hard to say where one influence ends and another begins. It's an approach that's mirrored in how the group switches it up on the mic. If you're not paying attention, you might mistake Hubley's croon for Kaplan's warble, and you might mistake James McNew's high-pitched voice as either Hubley or Kaplan reaching for the high C over C.
It's also mirrored in how they denote songwriting credit-- all songs written by members of Yo La Tengo are attributed to Yo La Tengo, not to individuals. Three people, one voice, one body of song. The subtitle to this collection calls Prisoners of Love "A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent Songs". That 10-cent word in the subtitle-- senescent-- means "old" or "aging." As Byron Coley tells it in the liner notes, this "aging" involved the group transforming "from folk-rock reinvigorators into loose-stringed riff monsters, keyboard dream-pop hypnotizers, and beyond." Fine wines wish they could age as well as Yo La Tengo.
