Yo La Tengo

Around about this time last year, online satirical publication The Onion ran a story purporting to detail the aftermath of a conflagration at a Yo La Tengo gig. “Amongst the injured,” relayed the report, deadpan as ever, “were thirty-seven record store clerks, seven freelance rock critics, five vinyl junkies, an art-school dropout and a college radio DJ.”

Were the Ambassador to go up in flames tonight, the entire Dublin independent scene would probably be eliminated in one fell swoop.

But then, Yo La Tengo are an almost parodically perfect indie band. You know the crowd they appeal to: black-clad, chain-smoking arty types who have at least one Slint record in their collection, adore the third Velvet Underground album and take a quiet, vaguely embarrassed satisfaction at twigging the Thomas Pynchon references in Ira Kaplan’s lyrics.

This gig never comes close to scaling the stratospheric heights attained during the band’s Olympia show a couple of years ago, which remains one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Back then, of course, Yo La Tengo were playing in support of their hauntingly brilliant And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out LP, an album that – thanks to such works of spine-tingling magnificence as ‘Saturday’ – remains one of the finest accounts of terminal suburban ennui ever committed to record, the aural equivalent of Richard Linklater’s brilliantly bleak Gen X movie, Suburbia.

The band’s most recent offering, Summer Sun, took a significantly different set of influences as its template, eschewing the downtempo ambient vibes of And Then Nothing, in favour of the sort of hobo-jazz feel which flowed through the group’s version of Sun Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’, as well as the occasional retro-surf flourish.
Maybe it’s the fact that such nuanced music isn’t particularly suited to a theatre of the Ambassador’s size, perhaps it’s down to the venue’s sound system, or maybe the band are just having an off night – but this gig never really catches fire, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Which is a real shame, because, when on form, Yo La Tengo are more than capable of producing moments of transcendental brilliance.