Yo La Tengo - Summer Sun
(Matador)
Since and including Painful, I think all of Yo La Tengo's albums have deserved tens to twelves out of twelve, each one improving on the last, incorporating new musical ideas and reaching new levels of lyrical intimacy all without becoming treacly or obvious or retread in the process. 2001's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out continued along this exponential curve ending with one of my favorite YLT songs "Night Falls on Hoboken", an eighteen minute nigh-suite that consistently manages to keep my attention for the whole time. The question is then, does Summer Sun continue upon this curve, does it plateau, or was And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out the apogee?
This is a somewhat difficult question to answer. Plotting albums like ordered pairs is, while effective in letting one know relative worth, a bad analogy for elucidating those little things that really make you dig an album, the ineffable qualities of the music, and I want to say that Summer Sun isn't as good as the last one, and song for song, on their own, I don't think it is, but taken as a whole, the album exudes a thematic coherence that was lacking on And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. I'm not sure what their intention was for it, but it always struck me as being a night-oriented album; maybe not necessarily a concept album about night, but something that was supposed to evoke that sense, and perhaps it was the album art and final song that make me think that, but taken as such, my problem with it is that it then didn't live up to that interpretation. Songs like the self-plagiarized "Cherry Chapstick" seemed to, er, stick out and ruin the mood that was set. Right or wrong about the interpretation, I thought that while the songs were strong, the album wasn't as solid as a whole as I had wanted it to be.
The opposite is true though with Summer Sun. If we take it at face value, a summer-evoking experience, it is undeniably on the mark. I wish I could say why exactly, maybe someone with a better vocabulary or understanding could, but it just hits me at a gut level, some instinctual feeling that this album is the analogue of a warm, summer day. Maybe I'm forcing the analogy, doing some mental press ganging to make my interpretation fit the music. I don't know, but regardless I can close my eyes while listening to this and picture the gleaming sun reflecting off of some unknown surface in my mental repertoire, and I truly don't think that this is idiosyncratic. While everyone will obviously not have the same experience as me, I really believe that this album will carry the same connotations for a majority of listeners. Maybe not; maybe it's total self-indulgent crap to write all this, but regardless Summer Sun is well worth your time. Highly recommended.
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