Yo La Tengo
Fade

LA RECENSIONE

Disappear.

Return to the dust that fills the air.

Travel suspended, only to be inhaled by someone or something. By a woman absentmindedly shopping. By a cat in the sun staring at a lizard. By the last eagle left in the skies.

And then return again to the air, more alone, more mature, with the sadness of someone who found a small world, and lost it, who knows where, a moment later.

Fade is a reflective album. It carries the color of the last day of vacation. It has the taste of departure, that bitter aftertaste that loosens your tongue when you know something won't come back.

The languid strings of Is That Enough are the perfect example of how a melancholic smile is better than an amused laugh, a sunset painted in its own reflection, chills on the skin on a day that should never end.

Well You Better is another end-of-summer painting, with its distracted mood, it's the last walk along the seafront holding your thoughts by the hand. The same goes for Stupid Things, a distant and ethereal ballad that slips over your body.

The pop-rock of Paddle Forward is a jewel in full Sugarcube style (a classic indie-rock), and confirms how Yo La Tengo are masters in composing small anthems of distorted sugar.

An album that confesses with its truth, strips you bare to the bone, and brings out all the malicious honesty you've tried to hide. Fade puts you in front of yourself, it forces you to question your entire existence. Your mistakes, your failures, the memories you tried to kill, resurface like zombies. And you can't lie, not this time.

Maybe we are just passing through.

Maybe we are just a fading music, sweet like The Point of It. Perfect notes chasing each other and decaying into silence.

The lifting of the turntable's needle is the only possible ending.

No one teaches us how to die.

Disappear.