Yo La Tengo, Songs @ The MetroTheatre, Sydney (18/02/2010)

Tue 23rd Feb, 2010 in Gig Reviews

A night of music for music connoisseurs, by connoisseurs, this tour found New Jersey indie institution Yo La Tengo partnered by the hotly-tipped Songs, who share a fondness for economic and roughly tuneful garage rock with tonight’s headliners.

On tunes like Oh No they graft effortlessly pretty melodies on top of driving riffs and propulsive drums. Elsewhere, they’re content to hide tunes like scattered gold under layers of surf guitar and waves of noise, recalling alt-rock like Sonic Youth and Sebadoh as well as the jangly Flying Nun sound. They’re low-key performers, but armed with plenty of ideas and an air of unforced cool.

If Songs have pitched camp in a fairly well-defined corner of the musical universe, then Yo La Tengo’s output has been marked by an almost dizzying eclecticism, and their depth of musical knowledge and pure love of a range of genres was on display tonight from the opening bars of Tom Courtenay. The chiming power pop and yearning of that classic gave way to the epic Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Godkind, thick with guitar squalls and sprawling noise. Before long, they’d traded this controlled chaos for the gauzy loveliness of Tears Are in Your Eyes, a song which trades in restraint and subtlety rather than power.

Lest the night turn into some kind of greatest shoulda-been-hits recital, there’s also a generous selection from last year’s typically strong Popular Songs. That record was overlooked in many of 2009’s end of year lists, the trio having become almost victims of their own consistent excellence – a decade and a half into their career, a strong Yo La Tengo album is no longer a revelation to anyone.

Still, the straightforward Nothing to Hide rocks with the best of their work and recent live staple If It’s True bubbles along like a classic Motown duet with its call-and-response vocals. Periodically Double or Triple also makes an appearance, demonstrating their ability to change direction within a single song, swinging as it does from light funk to ear bleeding noise. Their deadpan humour is also on show here, as the song grinds to a halt for what seems like a full minute with nervous laughter passing through the crowd as the band stand motionless mid-song.

The energy soon returns with Stockholm Syndrome, one of their most affecting tunes, supplemented here by a scorching guitar freakout from Ira, and the nocturnal beauty of Won’t Have to Feel So Sad, which features hushed, almost spoken vocals over a persistent beat. It shows this band can do quiet reassurance and intimacy just as surely as they can make your ears ring. They also reach all the way back to 1993’s Painful for the simply beautiful ‘Nowhere Near’, Georgia singing its words of simple desperation (‘Do you know how I feel, How I feel about you?’) with absolute conviction.

Like their most recent record, however, this Yo La Tengo show is backended with extended journeys into the outer corners of guitar noise, Ira Kaplan coaxing abrasive sounds out of his battered guitar that bring to mind a jetplane taking off and fiddling with amplifier knobs like a mad scientist in a chaotic, cathartic finale.

They turn down requests for more epics in the encore, instead deciding on the plaintive White Feathers and ending with a tribute to “the great Young dynasty of Australia” with the best version of Love is in the Air you’ve ever heard. From most bands, this would be a joke, a half-arsed novelty, but in these capable hands it’s more a testament to their pure, unaffected love for music of all stripes and a reminder that there’s no song Yo La Tengo can’t make their own.