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Live Reviews
Live Review: Yo La Tengo at Royal Festival Hall in London on 12 Jun
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 29 June 2011
I won’t lie, it’s a little frustrating to watch one of your favourite bands on stage in front of you playing an entire set of songs that just don’t know. But for the first part of tonight, Yo La Tengo aren’t Yo La Tengo, they’re the Condo Fucks – a garage-rock band playing covers from The Kinks, The Troggs, Slade and The Small Faces, among others. A few nights ago, in Oxford, they were Dump – bassist James McNew’s lo-fi solo project. Tomorrow, the band might just play songs beginning with the letter S.
The culprit is a wheel-of-fortune that the band has been using on their most recent tour, which they’ve dubbed ‘Reinventing The Wheel’. Instead of a support act, a wheel gets spun at the start of each show to determine exactly what kind of set the band will initially perform. You might get the Condo Fucks, you might get a Q&A session interspersed with songs. If you’re particularly lucky, the band and crew might dispense with music entirely and re-enact an episode of a late 90s US sitcom. But tonight it’s the Condo Fucks, and – once you’re three songs in and the joke has worn off – it’s dull. And frustrating.
Thankfully, for the band’s second set they return to safer territory. There’s acres of material in Yo La Tengo’s 27 year history, and we get a smattering of all of it in the main set, from the beautiful, lighter-than-a-feather, opening of ‘Night Falls On Hoboken’ to the ten-minute feedback-infused ‘Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind’. It’s clear that Ira Kaplan loves indulging his noisier side, but cramming two extended guitar freakouts into a ten song set does try the audience’s patience a little. Normally seen as a crowd-pleaser, ‘Autumn Sweater’, as the first song in the encore, falls surprisingly flat, too.
But thankfully, over 27 years a band learns enough about stagecraft to win an audience over if they begin to drift, so there’s plenty of charm sprinkled about the set. ‘Big Day Coming’ is note-perfect, and ‘Cherry Chapstick’ punches in all the right places. You never quite know what you’re going to get from a set from Yo La Tengo, and tonight was no exception. But despite a few dips, I still left happy. DG
