Rarely does a band manage to write a collection of songs that cohesively exemplify the entire thesis of an album. Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo gracefully accomplished such a feat on a plethora of occasions. But the tangible gloom of the 2000 album “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out” is perhaps the greatest display within the band’s catalog.
Each song on the record is its own anthem for the melancholia of American suburbia. The textures of the songs range from stunning ballads to sprawling epics of spacey dissonance. Every sound is formulaic to creating the ambiance of fluttery dream pop, only punctuated by the grungy guitar of Yo La Tengo’s co-founder, guitarist and vocalist Ira Kaplan. The grunge, however, is featured rather sparsely in comparison to Yo La Tengo’s previous work.
The album is dense with ambient music as well as the tone of noisier pop. As seen on previous records like “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One” (1997), the band loves to play into the incredulity of screech and loudness with new takes on classic songs. With the 1997 album, they covered The Beach Boys classic “Little Honda” with awry distortion up the wazoo — making the song into a whimsical take on summer nostalgia. “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out” contains a more obscure cover of George McCrae's 1974 disco jam “You Can Have It All.” Alongside the radiant voice of Georgia Hubley and the percussive backup vocals of Kaplan and bassist James McNew, Yo La Tengo slows down the song for a less pop feel. Hubley's voice is an integral component to the luster of the record. The impassive, free-flowing sound of her words gives so much life and mood to an already thriving series of orchestrations.
The tone of the record, as an allusion to the somber life of the suburbs, makes Hubley’s voice so prominent and fit so well. Most of the songs touch on sentiments of loneliness. Tunes such as “Tears Are in Your Eyes” and “Madeline” are flawless instances of guitar work and vocals mingling to create a hypnotic experience. Kaplan slowly strums each string to create echoey and trippy effects that breathe phantasm into the album. Other songs such as “Cherry Chapstick” contain raucous, distorted beats that harbor cynicism and confusion behind Kaplan’s vocals. This track encapsulates the style intrinsic to Yo La Tengo as it calls back the more dissonant sounds of albums like “Painful” (1993) or “Electr-O-Pura” (1995).
The trio’s capabilities of stretching the bounds of the dream and noise rock genres are so enlightening. Even when Kaplan isn’t singing and merely speaking words about relationship troubles, it’s as touching as ever. This is heard in “The Crying Lot of G,” a title that references the verbose paranoid fiction of Thomas Pynchon’s novel “The Crying of Lot 49.” Additional examples of the group’s ingenuity relative to the genre include the organ-based cadence on “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” which poses possibly the most compelling hook on the album. And finally, the Whit Stillman homage with “Last Days of Disco.” Yo La Tengo so lovingly calls upon media ancestry and proceeds to write a song with almost zero connection. “Last Days of Disco” is arguably the most gripping song lyrically. The tune’s guitar sliding and notes used to mimic Kaplan’s vocals add so much texture.
Later, the album concludes with a seventeen-minute epic — a journey through the tranquility of the unknown. “Night Falls on Hoboken” is a conclusion to a harmonious album built on musical excess. The bass line, which is a continuous thread, is a gorgeous conglomerate of every tone on the record meshed into a single riff. There’s a flow to the bass, but the volume of each note varies — a representation of the dynamic flavor of the entire album. The song changes but the bass never does. The music solemnly slips you back into a dream, an illusory tale of fear and grace in the backstreets of a cold, dark suburb.
