Yo La Tengo
This Stupid World

The seven dwarfs were six. Dopey was actually a Rottweiler.

I have always dreamed of starting a quarrel about the YLT, with a scoop, the result of careful research, on the brothers Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm. Especially with the awareness that it would not be limited to the usual well-known, now conventional, news about Jacob's dust mite allergy and Wilhelm's excessive sensitivity to laundry detergents. Not to mention that the analogy between the two groups makes perfect sense, due to the artistic partnership of the Kaplan couple as long-lasting as the collaboration between the two krautphilologen.

So, this year, YLT have returned to release a canonical record, after the magmatic "We Have Amnesia Sometimes" and the delightful "Sleepless Night," both EPs, both from 2020. The album is, once again, a completed and credible proposal of a rock as independent as it is encyclopedic, still capable of offering light and edges. The three musicians, for this "This Stupid World," have embraced a serene expressive freedom, which will take them far into the future, perhaps envisioning a more singer-songwriter direction for their rock.

But back to the Grimms: why was the beautiful Italian translation 'Nevolina' lost, in favor of 'Snow White'? I like Nevolina! Nevolina is the voice of Georgia Hubley, a delicate soprano made of sleet. And on the drums, she knows her stuff, as imaginative as the geometries of snowflakes. And she knows how far to go down.

Among the seven dwarfs, Ira Kaplan is Doc (who started a company in my area producing and selling vegetable seeds, flower bulbs, soil, and bird food; not bad for an ex-employee of Philip IV Count of Waldeck's copper mines!). Because Ira is the scholar of the group. The one who knows he doesn't know, learns to learn, and has entrepreneurial spirit.

James McNew is Happy when he hears his rounded bass (his mimesis). Due to his height, James is also all the remaining dwarfs, except Dopey, whom we have, for good reason, already counted as a restless creature.

Hoboken is the unwelcome fourth: a veiled light of a small urban reality, especially when compared to what lies on the other side of the Hudson River; but, somehow, urgent in its everyday life. A familiar dimension that closely resembles the domestic hearth of Hanau, on the Main River, 25 km from Frankfurt, where the Grimm brothers grew up; but they, however, grew up with a sound of slaps.

This time the Yo La Tengo are also the producers of the work; no externals, they mix their nine tracks by themselves, adhering to a collegiate and, as much as possible, live dimension. It aims to be the mirror of their plots. Thus they unfold for us, with beauty and excellent writing, a realistic fairy tale, in an empathetic and interpersonal album. With music breaking into life and ending up being life itself, but everyday life. A bit detached or too intertwined, because in the end it's always up to the music to fix things when they go wrong. But we exist because we move forward, despite everything, precisely thanks to the archive of notes we store in our hearts. And there, the music offers a secret pleasure to the soul; without filters, without trends, without appearing old or disguised. No matter how much Grumpy grumbles!

In Sinatra Drive Breakdown, a foggy song descends that expands guitar sparks into tortuous distortions, dislodged from the regularity of the bass and the relentless drumming. The track wonderfully derails but then returns to its tracks. It clatters and comes together, discharging tons of electricity on drenched ghosts, «Until we all break». It's the story of Hänsel and Gretel.

In This Stupid World, a furious, apotropaic Sabbath: walls of feedback, monotonous and obsessive percussion, abrasions and monolithic guitars, distorted loops, clangs and metallic jolts multiply. An aural haze that prepares for a fall into the abyss. But the choral singing has a saving transparency. Like in The Goose Girl one rises from blood, deceit, hatred, oblivion, lack of meaning. The parallel, in popular music, I speculate, is the Zappa-esque Help I’m A Rock. There it was to mock, here to depict a bad world; and that dog is Cerberus. Much worse than the Rottweiler I alluded to earlier. And, of course, less intelligent than any Dachshund. «This stupid world – is killing me / This stupid world – is all we have». Cerberus, in short, is the dog we are forced to tame!

Bidding farewell to the Hoboken trio is the poetic and evocative Miles Away, rarefied between electronic beat and shoegaze. Lost lightness at the threshold of an end that is a new beginning, mist breaching all boundaries, evanescent darkness on which a warm human breath rises, with the relief of a truce, and immobile mountains. «Keep brushing the dust from your eyes». Miles Away, when you have lost everything, is still The Rain of Stars.

So whoever you are, the Grimm brothers, the Kaplan couple, James McNew, Dopey or Nevolina, the Frog Prince or Tom Thumb, it doesn't matter. Just remember every now and then that the world needs fairy tales.