Sick Boy stated in a memorable passage of Trainspotting: "first you have it and then you lose it".
A constant, there's nothing you can do about it, a theorem in which the vast majority of artistic careers assumes the ruthless form of a parabola where every rise is followed by an inevitable decline..
And that's what it seemed like for Yo La Tengo to me, for whom the last two albums had taken on the tired and calm form and only superficially exciting feel of the "old" album.. that's why the new album sounds even more incredible, not only a wonderful exception that confirms (?) the rule, but also probably the best work ever produced by Yo La Tengo. They return to thrill with electricity, as immediately confirmed by the surprising opening of "pass the hatchet", which introduces yet another wonderful trip with nine minutes of reverberated and hypnotic psychedelic ride. But also, and above all, they demonstrate an intelligence and an awareness with few equals, in being conscious that what they had lately undertaken was nothing but their more stagnant version.
That is why "I'm not afraid of you and I will kick your ass" takes the form of a reasoning on their own journey, on their own expression, on what has distinguished their being musicians and artists. Reasoning, mind you, not a simple summary of their career, but an elaboration on the same. Which translates into a renewed humility, not trying to take new paths that perhaps at this point will never be, but rather being themselves 100% with a huge dose of irony (which only those who are capable of accepting their own limits can have), and at the same time with a capacity to move, to touch the very substance of their musical expression (that intimistic and dilated evocation that has always distinguished them), of which they had never proven so theoremically.
This is therefore an exceptional album because in a completely anachronistic way it reaffirms the aesthetic importance of that total expressive freedom which has been the philosophical soul (musically) of punk (and thus of Indie), demonstrating that precisely in the name of this freedom any now codified language can still rise to new vital energy. One could say, in strictly historical/musical terms, that for the first time the noisemaking of the most ambiguous and "east coast" evolutionary line of American psychedelia meets none other than the imaginative arrangements of swingin' London, filtered by that jingle jangle sensitivity that from the Byrds passed through R.E.M.
But it would be decidedly reductive to make it a matter of genres when talking about Yo La Tengo. What counts is that they are themselves to the nth degree, only more mature, rather than older.
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