"Oh demon reliability! Oh demon longevity! These twin curses can plague any decades-old band in an age when careers are measured in months. Yo La Tengo can count themselves in the rare company of this group, elder statespeople operating in a genre where they're influence-grandparents. And alongside peers Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips, YLT have to operate under the bane of their own consistency at a time when the new and a compelling narrative are over-celebrated. All three of those bands have reached a steady state where reinvention is unnecessary: They're so frequently good they don't even get a redemption story. Hell, Wavves already is set up for one of those.
Fortunately, as Yo La Tengo celebrate a quarter-century of existence with Popular Songs, their twelfth album, there's still plenty to like without a PR push. The Yo La Tengo repertoire has expanded steadily over the years, and the genre experiments of years past have slowly assimilated into their creative process until it's hard to remember the mere Velvets-jacking indie pop band they once were. The easy way to draw fickle attention to your dozenth album would be a drastic makeover, but Yo La Tengo are wise enough to choose continuity over the easy angle. And as far flung as these dozen Popular Songs may be, any Yo La Tengo scholar can easily trace their DNA back through their discography.
Now, forget I said all that for a moment, as the opening track and single, "Here to Fall", is the exception to the rule. Nearly guitarless, with a menacing electric piano and cinematic strings lifted from an Isaac Hayes soundtrack, it's an ear-catcher for anyone expecting the same old same old. If there's an antecedent here, it's the treasured "Autumn Sweater", but beaten and wary and a little dangerous, Ira Kaplan refusing to play the kindly, reassuring grandfather: "I know you're worried/ I'm worried too."
But it's a darkness that quickly lifts. "Avalon or Someone Very Similar" is upper-register psychedelia, dreamy and chipper. And when the drony keyboards and hazed-out Georgia Hubley vocals combine on "By Two's", we're safely back on familiar ground-- in this case the late-night dream cycle of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, arguably the band's last unmitigated success.
Some will surely find the return trip to that well a welcome reprise, others a tired retread-- pick your side and know whether you will Enjoy This Album. Because there are more historical echoes here, particularly in how Yo La can crank out a fuzz-pop anthem ("Nothing to Hide") or fragile, vaguely-countrified indie pop ("When It's Dark", James McNew's "I'm on My Way") in their sleep. Fortunately, they don't phone it in on those tracks, and slip ‘em into I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One and most people wouldn't know the difference.
Elsewhere, the band indulges its expanded palette by riffing on Motown, funk, and organ-boogie (not sure how else to classify "Periodically Double or Triple"), as they've been doing off and on for most of the decade. For most bands, the costume-swapping would be a novelty act, but Yo La Tengo, who prove their cover-band chops every year on WFMU, have hung these sounds permanently in their closet by this point. "If It's True" is pure Funk Brothers karaoke complete with a spot-on bridge and AM-radio strings, but Hubley and Kaplan's back-and-forth duet is too adorable to nit-pick.
After nine tracks, the only thing missing would be the usual YLT epic, and well, the band doesn't disappoint. In an odd bit of sequencing, all the long tracks are clumped together at the end, forming a trilogy of nine-minute-plus jams with wildly varying results. "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven" is the only one that could have slipped into the front half of the album unnoticed, a gorgeously unspooling meditation that suits its ethereal title. But the stark acoustic riff that makes up most of "The Fireside" is interminable, and "And the Glitter Is Gone" is 16 minutes of the usual Kaplan noise-skronk that will tempt all but the most devoted YLT fans to cut the album short.
Thanks to whoever pushed them to the back, those missteps are easily ignored, leaving a 10-track record (of a more reasonable length) that can compete with anything since the band's heyday. It's easy to overlook the sound that's on display through the bulk of Popular Songs as more of the same, but it's also uniquely Yo La Tengo in a way that has taken 25 years to reach vintage status. Experience can be a crutch, an excuse to tread water in comfortable waters. But Popular Songs wears its age well, a calm but firm reminder of an indie rock perennial it's all too easy to take for granted." PITCHFORK
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