Detail of a Japanese postcard by unknown artist titled "Japanese Postal Service", 1905
"Unassuming" is a much nicer word than "boring", and the low-key music of Yo La Tengo can't really be called boring (by me, anyway) - I'm never bored when listening to it, even when I think I should be. So it must be unassuming.
Yo La Tengo's new album Popular Songs has an inviting name, much more so than 2006's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. And where that album aggressively challenged the listener, starting with an 11-minute groove-heavy jam and sticking a 9-minute ambient piece in the middle of the tracklist, Popular Songs is structured in a more inviting way as well. It has its atmospheric epics - it would hardly be a Yo La Tengo album without them - but they are annexed into an area of their own at the end of the tracklist. For me, this approach works a lot better - I can just listen to the nine pop songs at the beginning of the album and then opt in or out of the second portion, depending on my mood.
The three long numbers at the end of Popular Songs could be seen as alternate endings, choose-your-own-adventure style. My favorite is the 9-minute "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven", a long, dreamy number with some atmospheric backward guitar and nice lulling vocals. The 11-minute acoustic-and-feedback-based "The Fireside" is less successful, sounding more like a piece of film music, but the final 16-minute track "The Glitter Is Gone" is the only one of the three that is solely instrumental. It's a real guitar-heavy jam with a nice feel of ebb and flow to it, but I have to be in the mood for that sort of thing for it to be my preferred way to end Popular Songs.
I should probably jump back to the nine shorter songs that start Popular Songs - they are mostly excellent, if a little lighter and twee-er than you might expect from Yo La Tengo. The opener, "Here to Fall" is as adventurous as the pop section gets, built on a bass riff and string arrangement. Elsewhere, they do the fuzzy pop thing (a la "Cherry Chapstick" or "Sugarcube") with "Nothing to Hide", lounge-y organ funk on "Periodically Double or Triple", and even a Belle-and-Sebastian-style number with a Beatlesy bridge in "When It's Dark" featuring an excellent lead vocal from Georgia Hubley. The album's one real Ira-and-Georgia duet, "If It's True", is dressed up like a Motown number (think Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell) and it's a fun - if not really convincing - pastiche.
"Avalon or Someone Very Similar" features the prototypical Yo La Tengo sound circa Painful, with sighing backing vocals and a warm organ sound. Yo La Tengo has been making consistently excellent albums for twenty years, and its give them the option of cherry-picking from earlier styles that fans will really appreciate. At this point, they are masters of their craft, and if you find them boring you probably bailed out ages ago. If you didn't, Popular Songs will probably have everything you look for from Yo La Tengo.
"Avalon or Someone Very Similar" by Yo La Tengo
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