Ira Kaplan witnessed the rock era from a close vantage: He watched the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan”; was picked up hitchhiking in the early 1970s by Arlo Guthrie; was a regular at punk institutions CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City; wrote for pioneering zine the New York Rocker; and with his wife Georgia Hubley as Yo La Tengo, he witnessed indie rock slowly coalesce and eventually corporatize. Since adding James McNew in the early 1990s, Yo La Tengo have singularly defined American indie rock, merging their sui generis suburban psychedelia with a record collector’s urge to re-animate rock history and a mordant sense of humor about the inherently silly nature of their chosen profession. So when an interviewer recently asked Kaplan why the band named their 15th album after Sly and the Family Stone’s epochal, deeply political 1971 LP, Kaplan’s droll reply was perfectly on-brand: “To run away from your question as fast as possible, I think a lot of the things we do just feel right and don’t get articulated.”
Such is the gestalt of Yo La Tengo, a band that, almost in spite of its members’ encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century music and penchant for irony, operates most effectively at the level of feel. Self-aware enough to know the innate arbitrariness of album titles while simultaneously acknowledging the subtle power of words and names to shape the rituals of listening, Yo La Tengo’s reticence to divulge it all is less rockstar mystique than generosity of spirit. Like so many of the band’s lyrics, words function as decontextualized mantras, short phrases to roll around in your mind while the music gradually cocoons you. There’s a Riot Going On is full of meditative lyrical repetition: “Blow on the fire/Ashes blow away,” “She may/She might,” “Sound asleep/Counting sheep/Dream away.” At a time when musicians are pushed to unpack and explain every last syllable they produce, it’s a relief for one to insist on the potency of musical affects over literal definitions.
The album’s release comes in the wake of some of most volatile street-fighting since Sly’s own heyday, with no guarantee that future flare-ups won’t rage on for longer, at greater cost. This fact is certainly not lost on the band, but, if this is your chosen interpretation, you know better than to expect Riot to respond in kind—what they offer is closer to a balm. Consider “Above the Sound,” in which Kaplan’s voice emerges following three-and-a-half minutes of buzzing tribal rumble to ask, in his characteristic philosopher’s whisper, “What if we’re too black and blue/To spot our latest bruise?” After a year-plus of low-level fear generated by push-notification trigger warnings, the trio suggests in the song’s title—repeated over and again—a form of sonic self-care. This specific post-traumatic calm is reminiscent of a recent episode of HBO’s “High Maintenance,” in which an enterprising weed deliverer and his network of New York clients consistently express shock about some recent calamity that goes unnamed. Maybe it’s the outcome of the 2016 election, maybe it’s another mass shooting—it’s never explained, we just see reactions, and then self-medication. Riot also evokes this feeling.
In his review of the band’s eclectic 2015 covers collection Stuff Like That There, Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman winkingly claimed that “Yo La Tengo were essentially the first on-demand music-streaming service,” due to their capacity to seemingly cover any song on a second’s notice. There’s more to the streaming metaphor than eclecticism, though: Such services are also used as mood-generating machines, trained to to facilitate calmness and sedation. In this view, Riot is possibly the moodiest Yo La Tengo album yet. It’s the least song-oriented and most monochromatic LP in the band’s catalog, without a Kaplan whammy-bar wild-out or a pop palate cleanser to be heard. In the center of the album is a 12-minute block of largely wordless ambience—the two-part rumination “Dream Dream Away” and the fluttering organ drone and staticky radio transmissions of “Shortwave”—that seems equally informed by their recent conceptual and soundtrack side-hustles. On Riot, Yo La Tengo sound more brooding than ever, which is saying something coming from the band that gave the world the 77-minute tone-poem, 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.
Though it can feel a bit too calm and sedate, the album also reflects the group’s greatest and most instantly recognizable strengths. Their sound might suggest that they’re wound up in nostalgia, but that’s never been the case: They are able to tap into a performative naïvete. Whether through their coy reluctance to talk about themselves or their legacy, their self-mocking covers of a record store’s full of 45s, an unironic innocence distinguishes Yo La Tengo from their peers or predecessors, and it’s in full display on the album’s first quarter. There’s “Shades of Blue,” a sweet Georgia lullaby about the fugue state of romantic longing, “She May, She Might,” which recalls the frozen recognition that you may never really know the person you spend your life with, and the evergreen pleasures of endless courtship on “For You Too.”
Yo La Tengo’s gift for waxing on the indeterminacies of interpersonal relationships is their greatest gift as musicians, but there’s something about Riot that makes it feel like cold comfort. On Riot’s closer “Here You Are,” a message of resistance has petrified into something more menacing. “We are out of words/We’re out of time/Believe the worst,” they chant. Then, perhaps, an omen: “We had our run, we’re gone.” Is Yo La Tengo suggesting we’re past the point of healing? Or is the sentiment more autobiographical—does the 34-year-old band see the end of their own line coming sooner than later? I bet if you ask them, they’ll stare down at their hands and deflect the question, or crack a wry joke. Firm answers aren’t their thing.
