It comes as a shock that Yo La Tengo, the Garden State’s finest rock band (sorry, Boss), has been playing for nearly 20 years. Not only are these three newly middle-aged Jerseyites still functioning and creative, their trademark classic indie rock remains as fresh and innovative as ever despite stylistic shifts and gradual maturation. Prisoners of Love, Yo La Tengo’s new three-CD retrospective, is the sound of a band coming into its old age. It manages to be simultaneously nostalgic and hopeful-remembering the best years while looking toward the future.
The two best-of discs pull from every album except the band’s lousy 1986 debut Ride the Tiger, treating its early Velvet Underground derivations, phenomenal mid-’90s noise-pop period and quieter, jazzier recent work fairly equally. The thoughtful selections capture the band at its most appealing; while there are a few too many slow songs nudged in, the compilation succeeds astoundingly well at compressing an expansive body of work into a cohesive little bundle of aural bliss.
The self-explanatory bonus disc, A Smattering of Out-takes and Rarities, is a dream come true for long-time fans. There are heart-achingly good acoustic renditions of fuzzy power-pop masterpieces “Tom Courtenay” and “Decora,” demos and re-imaginings of classics like “Big Day Coming” and “Green Arrow” and brilliant one-off tracks like “Dreams” that unjustly languished in obscurity. Excepting Kevin Shields’ poorly constructed remix of “Autumn Sweater,” the rarities are on par with the best of Yo La Tengo’s back catalogue.
Like Matador’s reissues of Pavement’s seminal albums, Prisoners of Love offers both an ideal introduction for the budding hipster and a care package for those who have loved the band for years. As the collection’s title implies, Yo La Tengo is a band dedicated to love through all the years and sounds they’ve traversed; love of their influences, of experimentation, of each other (two of the trio are husband and wife) but above all of the quest for that one perfect note on the guitar.
