Yo La Tengo on There's a Riot Going On

“I think the very fact that we exist as a band is a very strong form of protest.”

Yo La Tengo have been making music together for 34 years. There are plenty of other numbers you could reel off as testament to their longevity – how many records they’ve released, shows they’ve played, countries they’ve visited – but at a certain point, the statistics begin to lose their meaning. Consider it this way, instead; since they formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984, they’ve seen several waves of emo crest and then crash, watched as grunge burned out rather than fade away, witnessed the deconstruction and redefinition of indie rock by the likes of Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, looked on as Britpop came and went on the other side of the Atlantic, seen the same thing happen at the opposite end of the Hudson River to the New York bands of the early noughties, eschewed DFA and dance-punk later the same decade and ridden out the synthpop storm of the past few years. Yo La Tengo have only ever marched to the beat of their own drum.

Or, more specifically, to that of Georgia Hubley’s kit; she founded the band with her then boyfriend and now-husband, guitarist and singer Ira Kaplan, and the pair have been accompanied by bassist James McNew since he completed the line-up in 1992. The trio have never been impervious to the tastes of the day but their commitment to experimentation on their own terms has made them beloved of hardcore musos for decades now (case in point, a headline from The Onion in 2002: “37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster.”)

This is a band for whom nothing seems off-limits as long as they consider it fun enough. In 2006, they released a thirty-one track covers album called Yo La Tengo is Murdering the Classics that ran the gamut from The Stooges' Raw Power to The Knack's My Sharona. 2011, meanwhile, saw them take a giant wheel on tour, which they’d spin and play whichever set that it landed on; options included an entire show of songs beginning with the letter ‘s’, a sit-down Q&A session, or a garage-rock noise-fest from their alter-egos, Condo Fucks. One evening, the wheel hit “act out an episode of a classic sitcom,” and accordingly, the Chicago crowd were treated to Seinfeld’s The Chinese Restaurant in its entirety.

This disregard for convention continues apace; after 2013’s delicate Fade met with career-high reviews that compared it favourably with the seminal likes of I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, they followed it not by striking whilst the iron was hot with another original LP, but instead with Stuff Like That There, which blended a clutch of new tracks with covers of both other artists and of classic Yo La Tengo cuts. Only now are they returning proper with yet another left turn on a career path defined by them.

Where Fade was a relaxed, melodic exercise in cohesion, There’s a Riot Going On is quite the opposite. Over the course of fifteen tracks, the band cover a tremendous amount of stylistic ground; they take on everything from washed-out dream-pop (the album’s bookends, You Are Here and Here You Are), barely-there ambience (Dream Dream Away and Shortwave), soft scuzz-rock (She May, She Might) and even, on quickfire interlude Esportes Casual, a little bossa nova. It’s an album that’s as impressionistic and light of musical touch as anything they’ve ever put out but, beneath the surface, there’s an uneasy, undulating tide of quiet discontent, one that speaks to the maelstrom of political and social uncertainty currently swirling across America.

Not that it was necessarily designed as such. In fact, it wasn’t really designed as anything; this record, all feel and atmosphere, happened by accident. After two months of work on the soundtrack to the as-yet-unreleased film Far from the Tree spilled over, the three kept recording abstract new ideas, without having any kind of endgame in mind. “It makes me think of those documentaries you see about bands,” says McNew, calling in from the thick of rehearsals at the group’s New Jersey base. “They’ll go, 'Fleetwood Mac arrived in the studio with no new material!' and you just think, 'What? Were they crazy? That just sounds as if they’re wasting everybody’s time,' but actually, that’s kind of how this record came together. We were totally jamming; it was really spontaneous, and we were just figuring things out as we went along. So, basically, we did a Fleetwood Mac, I guess. For better or worse!”

The album was conceived (written doesn’t feel like the right word) and recorded entirely by the three-piece in the same long-time rehearsal space that McNew’s speaking from; it allowed the record’s many diffuse ideas, some of which were parked for a year before being incorporated into a track, room to breathe and develop. “We’re very comfortable here,” explains McNew, “and working here removed from the equation that studio pressure that means that whenever you get a take wrong or miss a note, you can see the dollar signs floating away out of the window. That’s kind of a psychic baggage, you know? And as much as, unlike Fleetwood Mac, we were fully aware of our deadlines and schedules, we still felt as if we had the strength and confidence to try almost anything that came to mind. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work. It was challenging and weird, but really exciting, too.”

Yo La Tengo have never shied away from making bold pronouncements with their album titles – see, for instance, 2006’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass – but to co-opt Sly and the Family Stone’s 1971 opus There’s a Riot Goin’ On this time out seems especially brave. “It feels pretty appropriate,” says McNew, “both in terms of what was going on in the outside world at the time we were making it, and the way in which we actually put it together; there was a kind of rebellion to the way we approached it in musical terms. We haven’t really talked about it since. It’s a statement that matches the songs.”

The spectre of the present White House administration – a living nightmare for any American of a progressive bent – looms across There’s a Riot Going On, even if Kaplan’s explicitly said that he has no interest in writing out-and-out political songs; instead, the nearest we’ll likely get with Yo La Tengo is something like For You Too, which zeroes in on personal imperfections in the face of a social firestorm that would stir feelings of worthlessness in even the most self-confident individual. The album’s minor-key disquiet, McNew elaborates, is a kick back against America’s rightwards lurch, even if it doesn’t fit the Black Flag blueprint for protest music.

“First of all, I take that personally, because Black Flag are maybe my favourite band of all time!” he laughs. “But this album doesn’t feel gentle at all to me. Everything was so in-the-moment, and that means that when you collect all these songs, they reflect a period in time, and you can sense what we were trying to say. I don’t think there’s a rule that protest music has to be made by somebody screaming into a megaphone. We’d never be able to live with ourselves if we’d conformed to any of those clichés. We approached that in our own way, intentionally or otherwise.”

The thing is, Yo La Tengo operate outside of the usual sphere of creative anxiety for a band. They don’t have to worry about whether or not their fanbase will be alienated by the avant garde approach they’ve taken with this latest effort – they know full well that they’ll relish it. They know they don’t have to paint with broad strokes thematically; followers and critics alike will be able to sense what provoked the palpable discomfort that threads the tracks together on There’s a Riot Going On. They realise, too, that nobody will think less of them for improvisation and creative thinking when they translate this new material to the stage.

“It wasn’t like we were trying to keep anybody out of the loop, when we were making this record,” reflects McNew. “I don’t feel that we locked ourselves away; we were enjoying playing recordings for our friends the whole time. We were just trying to find the strength and humanity to be ourselves, in the face of the adversity that was happening. In the process, we made some strange new sounds, and it was so enjoyable. That was all we we were hoping for.”

---

There’s a Riot Going On is available now via Matador
Yo La Tengo play SWG3, Glasgow, 29 Apr