Yo La Tengo were essentially the first on-demand music-streaming service. Through the eclectic all-request sets they used to perform for WFMU’s annual fundraising drive and, more recently, their annual Hanukkah shows at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, the band has amassed an infinite jukebox of cover songs spanning golden oldies to underground oddities. It’s almost as if Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley started this band so that they could one day be the sort of tastemaking entity that can rescue forgotten songs from dollar-bin obscurity or subject popular ones to a critical reassessment.
But while it’s customary for indie-rock acts to approach bygone pop hits with subversive intent, Yo La Tengo never sound like they’re taking the piss, preferring to acclimatize themselves to the original material’s natural habitat rather than try to radically change the song’s context. And yet, whether they’re covering Sun Ra or Sonny Bono, Yo La Tengo covers sound unmistakably like Yo La Tengo songs, because they serve the exact same function as the band’s best originals: they’re intimate exchanges, the sound of secrets being revealed. And as Yo La Tengo’s latest covers-heavy set attests, that quality becomes all the more amplified when those exchanges are rendered as whispers.
Given Yo La Tengo’s well-established karaoke-machine rep, the arrival of acoustic-oriented covers collection Stuff Like That There isn’t as revelatory as their previous acoustic-oriented covers collection, 1990’s Fakebook, which opened up a new dimension to what had then been a pretty straight-forward, scrappy rock band (a primitive state they revisited on 2009’s all-electric complement, Fuckbook, credited to their garage-punk alter ego, the Condo Fucks.) But Stuff Like That There makes perfect sense in the wake of 2009’s Popular Songs and 2013’s Fade, which displayed a gradual drift away from the band’s feedback-blasted extendo-jams toward succinct, small-scale statements.
Though the album's sources range from '40s country to '60s soul to '90s alt-rock, the execution here is uniform, all brushed-snare rhythms, tasteful twang, and gentle acoustic strums that permeate the air like a late-afternoon drizzle. The readings are low-key and reverential, but the spirit is loose and playful. The Hubley-led versions of Darlena McCrea’s swooning 1964 single “My Heart’s Not In It”, Hank Williams’ tear-in-beer standard “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, and The Parliaments’ psych-soul serenade “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” manage to feel on point and off the cuff at the same time, as if the band were pulling precious seven-inches from their protective sleeves and not giving a fuck if they get scratched.
But Stuff Like That There is not just another excuse for Yo La Tengo to show off their encyclopedic knowledge of pop history. At this stage of their career, it also serves as a poignant reminder of the ’80s and ’90s indie-rock peers who never achieved the same level of success, like Louisville contemporaries/collaborators Antietam (a faithfully reproduced “Naples”), Hoboken hero the Special Pillow (the charming, harmony-rich “Automatic Doom”), and R.E.M.-esque Ohio outfit Great Plains, whose jagged ‘n’ jangly anthem “Before We Stop to Think” is given a beautifully wounded reading by Kaplan. By contrast, the album’s lone concession to popular taste—Hubley’s wistful take on the Cure’s atypically sunny 1992 single “Friday I’m in Love”—feels out of place amid the record-collector finds and personal connections that inform the bulk of the tracklist, coming off instead like a novelty that just isn’t novel enough (not to mention a distant second in the pantheon of Cure covers by A-list American indie-rock power trios).
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Yo La Tengo covers album without the band covering themselves. But while the trio is notorious for radically redressing its droning noise-rock odysseys as lilting lullabies and vice versa (often trading Kaplan’s voice for Hubley’s in the process), the rustic redrafts of Popular Songs’ “All Your Secrets” and Electr-o-Pura deep cut “The Ballad of Red Buckets” don’t differ all that much from their official takes—the amplifier settings may be adjusted a touch downward, but the essential vibe remains. The major exception is a tiptoed pass through I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One’s swirling centerpiece “Deeper Into the Movies”, though unlike Yo La’s previous loud-to-quiet transitions (like the ambient “Big Day Coming” that opens Painful, or Camp Yo La Tengo’s skiffled take on “Tom Courtenay”) it feels less like a wholesale rethink than a rough sketch that makes you long for the surging force of the original. Thankfully, Yo La Tengo compensate for the superfluousness of these self-covers with two top-notch new tracks: The excellent “Rickety” continues the motorik momentum of Fade standout “Stupid Things”, with the band sounding like buskers on the shoulder lane of the Autobahn, while Kaplan’s “Awhileaway” is a gorgeous moonlit stroll of a ballad.
Stuff Like That There may not always intrigue on a track-by-track basis, but, taken as a whole, the record stands as a loving portrait of Yo La Tengo’s vast musical and social universe condensed into a small wooden frame. And at a time when the full-album experience is giving way to the almighty playlist, Stuff Like That There handily reasserts Yo La Tengo’s reputation as indie rock’s consummate curators. Your music subscription service of choice may present you with a hundred different mood-based mixes to complement Sunday-morning sloth, but Stuff Like That There is really the only one you need for a day spent lazing away in your little corner of the world.
