Yo La Tengo, There’s a Riot Going On
On March 16, Yo La Tengo (YLT) released the 15th masterpiece of their 34-long career: There’s a Riot Going On. With a total of 15 tracks, there was plenty of room for the band’s iconic experimentalism. From peculiar instrumentals to innovative six-minute pieces, Yo La Tengo again stays true to their strange yet entrancing character. There’s a Riot Going On embraces the authentic style of its creators, and serves as a testament to the success of exploratory sound.
The album opens with an entirely instrumental track, “You Are Here,” whose guitar reverb, bells for percussion, and steady tempo promises an uplifting potential for the rest of the album. Although the song runs past the lengthy five-minute mark, the melody’s construction by the gradual addition of new instruments allows for repetition without the dread of redundancy — a technique long mastered by the trio.
Perhaps the album’s best songs, “Shades of Blue,” “She May, She Might,” and “For You Too,” follow in successive order, forming a brilliant first half of the album. “Shades of Blue” is the standard YLT folk tune, with vocalist Georgia Hubley’s mellow, rather raspy voice leading the way. The melancholic lyrics, “Laid in my room to reflect my mood / facing my feelings for a life without you” seem ironic against the upbeat background of chipper guitar strums, but even so, Hubley’s tone effortlessly complements the arrangement. In “She May, She Might,” band-leader Ira Kaplan’s singing wades hesitantly through the soft waves of seventh chords, culminating in a timid yet dreamy melody that reflects the tentativeness of the piece’s title. Finally, when “For You Too” comes around, listeners are cast into a hazy glow of distorted vocals and electric basslines. The hopeful guitar plucking is what augments the sentimental mood, and follows through until the end.
Evidence of YLT’s eclectic personality is sprinkled about on songs like “Ashes,” with its sudden shift to synthetic keys and beats, or “Shortwave,” with its celestial extended notes. When we finally arrive to the closing track, “Here You Are,” we again are exposed to another experimental selection of sounds: a muffled spoken dialogue from a telephone call, an upright string-bass, a shaker. The song’s long introduction reminds us of the opening track, “You Are Here,” bringing There’s a Riot Going On to a satisfying full circle. Once the voices of all three band members kick in, the frenzy of sound is stabilized beneath the inspiring unison of the band announcing their exit: “We’re out of words / We’re out of time…” And like the track’s title states, there we are, a little dazed and a little saddened at their departure, but looking forward to their next return.
