Yo La Tengo
Stuff Like That There
(Matador)
It’s a brave band who try to replicate the heartbreak incarnate of Hank Williams’s I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, and come away with a gold medal. Then again, Yo La Tengo have a better track record than most in this department, as they’re renowned for their encyclopaedic repertoire of cover songs as much as their own self-penned material released over a 29-year career.
A quarter of a century on from their genre-defining covers-and-originals album Fakebook, the band from Hoboken, New Jersey have gone and done another one, this time taking a mostly acoustic, mostly countrified spin through a notably diverse songbook.
Although the songs are drawn from far and wide – and confuse the concept by including a couple of new compositions, plus covers of past Yo La Tengo tracks – there’s a steady beat/simple strum approach here that doesn’t rock the boat but instead makes everything intimately, melodically, romantically and distinctively their own.
The aforesaid Hank Williams classic gains an extra weeping note in the refrain, while Darlene McCrea’s My Heart’s Not In It retains all the cute melodic brio of writers Gerry Goffin and Russ Titelman at their height. The only (mild) disappointment is The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love, which sticks close to a typically jangly indie-cover formula.
Alan Morrison
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