AMS Album of the Week 9

Yo La Tengo are not the sort of band you can pigeonhole. Their albums are a mishmash of genres from across the alternative rock spectrum and beyond. Their latest effort, Fade, is slightly less of a mixed bag. All of the standard sounds are here, but they don’t get their own tracks any more. There are no songs here that are primarily shoegaze or psychedelic or folk. The vast majority of the album is indie pop with shoegaze or psychedelic or folk influences. The tracks not only stand up individually, but they also all work as a coherent body as well. It’s an interesting change and one I’m not 100% about.

The tracks themselves are generally pretty great. ‘Ohm’ is a Pavement track slowly drowning under more and more layers of fuzzy distortion, and it’s as good as it sounds. ‘Is That Enough’ is YLT’s take on Tindersticks-esque chamber pop and it is one of my favourite tracks of recent months. ‘Well You Better’ sounds a bit like Eels meets the Housemartins and they have a fairly subdued evening together, but it’s better than it sounds. ‘Paddle Forward’ is a fairly standard 90s indie track (think Guided by Voices / Sebadoh), but it’s a fairly good one. ‘Stupid Things’ is the sort of thing I think Youth Lagoon would sound like as a full band, and it makes me really want Youth Lagoon to start being a full band. ‘I’ll Be Around’ is beautiful, understated and subtle. The delivery of the line ‘and I still miss you at times’ is probably the closest YLT will ever come to making a grown man cry.

This is a really good album. Come the end of the year this will probably be in my top 10 and it’ll be getting a lot more listens over the next few weeks. I just have one problem with it. About halfway through you do really start craving a huge fucking noise track. Yo La Tengo’s classic albums work because of the contrasting tracks, not despite them. The whole point was that it didn’t blend together – it was supposed to surprise and excite and challenge. Fade all feels a bit safe, a bit, dare I say it, boring. It’s the sort of album I’ll put on when I’m doing something else, but I wouldn’t be able to sit in a darkened room and listen to this in the same way I can with I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.

Stuart Masson