A Short History of the Band Yo La Tengo

Yo La Tengo formed in 1985. It was a time of turning feedback and guitar noise into a usable pop sound. Arch underground noise experimentalist Glenn Branca was detuning six guitars and getting them to play the same chord over and over to create a wall of sound that would even give pop eccentric Phil Spector the heebeegeebees. Sonic Youth began putting the noise into pop and a couple of years later the Jesus And Mary Chain broke their effects pedal while dancing to the Velvet Underground and came up with their own brand of droning noise and Beach Boys at Halloween Ball melodies on their "Psychocandy" album. Enter stage left Yo La Tengo. All set to follow a similar course. Their vocalist and guitarist, and former music journalist and sound man, Ira Kaplan had a very big record collection of his own and a spot on Lou Reed vocal style.

The Mo Tucker part was played by Kaplan's partner Georgia Hubley and the rest of the band were his very talented musician friends. They initially sounded like Velvet Underground meets Mission Of Burma. Then James McNew joined on bass and they acquired a sense of groove. Their thrilling live performances showed that the band was full of music fans as well as talented musicians who thought nothing of swapping instruments or taking audience requests for covers that they probably had never played together before.

Yo La Tengo's debut album "Ride The Tiger" was produced by Mission Of Burma bassist Clint Conley. The album has two sorts of song. The quiet wistfully melancholic ones and the noisy rock ones. There are also a couple of covers of obscure songs by Love and the Kinks and sound as though the band had written them. The two follow up albums, "New Wave Hot Dogs" and "President Yo La Tengo", have a more direct and melodic style sometimes stripped right down to the simple bones or droning guitars. The "Facebook" album was full of obscure covers by the likes of Ray Davies, Gram Parsons, Cat Stevens and John Cale though again Yo La Tengo make them sound like their own creations. Next up was "Painful" which is where bassist James McNew comes in. The album has an added sense of groove that does well to keep Kaplan's splaying feedback in check. It was a fine album but the follow up could be seen as a defining moment in their long history.

"I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" summed up everything good that had been going on in alternative guitar music for the previous ten years. It was released in 1997 and features the harmonics and feedback of Sonic Youth, the krautrock pop mix and vocal harmonies of Stereolab, the "I really can't be assed" irony of Pavement, and most importantly the melodic craft of Yo La Tengo. There's a lot of controlled mayhem combined with tragic melancholy. On first listen it all sounds so perfectly "less is more". Yet it becomes apparent that all that seemed so simple is in fact a genius of layered sonic complexity, textures and rhythms which never get in the way of the melody. A tough feat to pull off but they managed it.

Yo La Tengo have continued to subtly shift between sonic mayhem and restrained melodic narrative and have never reached the heady popular heights of some of their fellow indie stalwarts. However few bands can match the grasp that Kaplan & co. have on the very dynamics that makes indie rock what it is.