TODAY IS THE DAY EP
YO LA TENGO
MATADOR
A friend of mine once asked his cousin, a rabid Yo La Tengo fan, what kind of music they played. She just said, “beautiful.” The band’s new EP Today is the Day offers an excellent example of the diverse styles the band incorporates that make them so hard to categorize. Released as a companion piece to the full-length album Summer Sun, which the band dropped earlier this year, Today is the Day makes up for some of the disappointment of its predecessor and manages to stand on its own as a pleasant summary of the band’s vast repertoire.
The title track opens the EP with a vastly different rethinking of the song “Today is the Day” from Summer Sun. While the album version was a laid back, synthesizer-drenched exercise in over-the-hill indie rock, the EP transforms it into an urgent, noisy power-pop adventure reminiscent of past Yo La Tengo benchmarks like “Tom Courtenay” or “Sugarcube.” “Styles of the Times,” an outtake from the Summer Sun sessions, follows in this vein with ringing feedback and Sonic Youth-esque anti-heroic guitar work. “Outsmartener” is definitely the weakest song present, sounding like a poorly played, uninspired tribute to the Velvet Underground, not unlike some of Yo la Tengo’s early work.
The EP drastically shifts gears with the country-flavored, completely acoustic Bert Jansch cover “Needle of Death,” a mix of campfire song spirit and Johnny Cash’s calmer moments. “Dr. Crash,” an outtake from the band’s 2000 album …And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, is a pleasant but unremarkable surf-guitar instrumental that exposes Yo La Tengo’s penchant for pop masked by ambient, post-rock-inflected layers of sound. The final song is a live version of the band’s fiercely chaotic white-noise anthem “Cherry Chapstick,” slowed to half-tempo and played entirely on acoustic guitar. While fans might not expect such a drastic reworking to hold up, the track is surprisingly lovely, and makes for an understatedly gorgeous closer to the CD. This diverse release will win back the hearts of long time fans disappointed by the monotony of Summer Sun, and has the potential to gain the band many new fans as well.
—Christopher J. Norton
THE WEAKERTHANS
RECONSTRUCTION SITE
EPITAPH
They say listening to classical music makes you smarter-something about Beethoven invigorating brainwaves. But you don’t have to turn to the music of the 18th century to be enlightened-just pick up any one of The Weakerthans’ last three albums.
A self-described “four-piece power pop band from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada,” The Weakerthans load more irony, wit, puns and literary allusions into their albums than Joyce does in Ulysses. But, unlike Joyce, The Weakerthans infuse intelligence into their work without weighting it down into the depths of boredom.
Take their latest album, Reconstruction Site, released only a month ago. Its most popular single, “Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris, 1961),” precisely illustrates their intelligent-but-fun qualities. Enmeshed within the happy-go-lucky guitar and drum pop music are lyrics that teach lessons in Foucault, geography and French.
The Weakerthans know how to just have fun, too. “A Cat Named Virtue” is a message written from the point of view of a cat to his apathetic owner. “We should open house, invite the tabby two doors down … I’ll cater with all the birds that I can kill”
Amid its funnier moments, though, parts of Reconstruction Site show the band’s more serious side. If alienation sounded like something, it would sound like The Weakerthans. (Provigil)
The harrowing song “Hospital Vespers” sounds like the score to a depressing death scene in a depressing movie. Like a William Carlos Williams poem, it’s short, it’s descriptive and it gets the job done. But most of the messages of solitude are less explicit, even hidden. Hidden enough, it seems, for many of the music critics out there to miss them altogether.
While images of sickness, death and hospitals repeat throughout the tracks, some critics have brushed off Reconstruction Site as The Weakerthans’ weakest album. But perhaps the band has just become a bit more cynical and far more subtle. Maybe subtle is weaker than obvious, or maybe it’s just a bit more mature.
The Weakerthans play Friday at Black Cat-1811 14th St. NW.
—Robert C. Anderson
