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Rating:
For Everyone
What is intimacy today? Stuff Like That There takes us to that intense harmony that we can achieve and have with very few people and very rarely. Not a mere exercise in style, calligraphic, but a further step in the research, in its own experimental way, that has always distinguished YLT. A step, here, totally in the direction of Folk. From the pages of the popular music encyclopedia to the pages of everyday life, and vice versa, seamlessly. In the mature vision, due to the age achieved, the album retrieves and replicates the intentions, thrills, and tenderness of 1990's Fakebook, a sparse flower of youth, fragrant, even naive, unripe, and thoroughly enjoyable. Today, without self-indulgence, this new compilation, among covers, autograph remakes, and two unreleased tracks, aspires, if not to proverbial “Magic moments,” at least to intimate moments, evoked with skill, credibility, and intellectual honesty. The subdued atmosphere of the acoustic setup, with measured electric guitar inlays (the trio welcomes back Dave Schramm, guitarist of the first album “Ride the Tiger”) prepares pieces that don't overwhelm but accompany and suggest, don't provoke but warm, or rather, heat up. In a delicate, not faint tone.
Standing out on the tracklist is the acoustic reinterpretation that enhances, by slowing it down, the melodic beauty of Friday I’m in Love: it doesn’t hide it but reveals it, dazzling, poignant. A beauty that is discretion and impulse at the same time. Almost like moving from an Ingres's Odalisque to Titian’s Venus (of Urbino).
Then there's the folk gentleness of Butchie’s Tune (cover of the Lovin' Spoonful), the ethereal, non-platonic embrace of My Heart’s Not in It (cover of Darlene McCrea), the shadowy I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry of the rebel Hank Williams, the tinkling I Can Feel the Melting Ice (emptied from the Funk of Parliament), the peaceful, anti-grunge reinterpretation of their own piece Deeper into Music (from “I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One”) and All Your Secrets (remake from “Popular Songs”) to whisper under the stars.
The superfluous is removed, thinned out; everything appears as it is, open to dialogue, simple, human. The gaze supports it. Or is it unbearable? I feel you watching.
I heard you looking.
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