Yo La Tengo “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One”
In early 1997, the internet was barely a thing. It was late Clinton era. There was no war. People had jobs. Nothing felt great but everything was “pretty good.” Music, on the other hand, sucked. Especially Rock music. This was peak Hootie and Third Eye Blind. Vinyl was dead. Even New York City, where I lived, was musically vacant. Williamsburg was factories and the Hassidim. The Strokes were not yet men. James Murphy was a nobody guitarist in a (pretty good) nothing, artsy hardcore band. There were quite literally no great bands from New York. When Helium or Modest Mouse came through town, it was a revelation for the three or four hundred of us who read fanzines and ignored each other at Other Music.
Those first few months of 1997 were an odd moment. A singular moment. We were just months away from a seismic event in music, after which, everything would be different. Bigger. More meta. But, until then, from January through May of 1997, I was certain that Sleater Kinney was the most important band in the world, that Built to Spill had made a perfect album and that Yo La Tengo did something impossible. On their eighth LP, in middle age no less, the trio from New Jersey quietly, almost reluctantly, became the best band on the planet. One month later, Radiohead would release “OK Computer” and Earth would shake. But for thirty days before, several thousand of us could hear our hearts beating as one.
I am not alone in my wistful attachment to this moment in time or in my adoration of Yo La Tengo’s “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.” 1997 can engender romantic nostalgia for Generation X. In the early days of the internet, so much was still possible and hopeful: Affordable Brooklyn. A blossoming Lower East Side. The very first reviews written on Pitchfork.com. The first seven inch vinyl sold online. Everything was getting bigger as the world got smaller. And, meanwhile, this band from New Jersey, that was both an Old Testament to the New York of the Velvet Underground and Television and a New Testament to College Rock, was having their brief, unlikely moment. Nobody would have predicted in 1986, when they sounded like a much less interesting version of their neighbors, The Feelies, that Yo La Tengo would wear the championship belt. Over their first few albums, as they buried their vocals and hid behind cover songs, nobody was prescient enough to imagine the leap they would make. It was not until their sixth album, “Painful,” that they could make claim to something great. And, as extraordinary as the next one, “Electr-O-Pura,” was, it is almost modest compared to its follow-up. So, in 1997, when Ira Kaplan, the former freelance music editor and critic, and Georgia Hubley, the daughter of socialist, Oscar winning cartoonists, delivered their masterpiece, I was both ready but also completely stunned.
Yo La Tengo’s late bloom is almost unprecedented. Many bands, perhaps The Beatles and The Stones most notably, released their best music well into their career. But the members of those bands were still in their late twenties or very early thirties at the time. The step function leaps that Yo La Tengo made in their thirties, however, culminated in a masterpiece on the cusp of middle age. When “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One” came out, it was like discovering that your friend’s cool older brother or sister had suddenly become Babe Ruth or Albert Einstein. The album was so vast in its reaches, so huge and so quiet in its sound. It demonstrated a confidence that felt impossible for a band so defined by shyness and reluctance.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Yo La Tengo’s triumph holds up in part because of the greatness of the songs and in part because of wistful nostalgia. But, perhaps more than anything, “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One” remains a revelation because it is music made by and for introverts. It is an album wherein the very private, interior dialogue between young adults in love blossoms. It includes all of the giddiness, awkwardness, secrecy, intimacy, fear and joy of a decade long love affair between wallflowers, told over sixteen songs and sixty-eight minutes. And it is rendered with the authenticity of a young heart and the wisdom of middle age.
On “Electr-o-Pura,” Yo La Tengo had mastered their two platonic forms: quiet, delicate, minimalist Pop songs contrasted against sprawling, loud, freakout meltdowns. On one song the amps would be turned way up. On the next they sounded like a whisper. Occasionally they would try both within the same song. No band, including the Velvet Underground, so perfected this trick. Even in their mastery, however, there was still something cerebral and suppressed about their records. It could occasionally come off like a lack of confidence or a lack of ego or a lack of desire. It was hard to tell. Live, though, this heady reluctance would disappear into a cloud of smoke and feedback. Between the inside jokes and wry stage banter, the seemingly modest trio would close their eyes and achieve something that approximated total consciousness. By the mid-90s, even a very sober twenty two year old like me could get very high seeing Yo La Tengo live.
On “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One” the youthful reticence and introversion is subsumed by a grown-up knowledge and fearlessness. And while the band had increasingly found a knack for great melody at any volume, by 1997 they were experimenting with Country and Latin forms. Emboldened by years of consideration, practice, and mostly, love, Yo La Tengo either ignored or surpassed their ostensible limits on “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.” It didn’t matter none of the members could sing especially well. It didn’t matter that none of them seemed interested in the part of the job that required an audience. In 1997, they were perfect in spite of their vulnerability. And because of it. As disruptively awesome as “OK Computer” was, it most decidedly lacks the sweetness and the humanity of Yo La Tengo’s high water mark. I admire Radiohead. But I adore Yo La Tengo.
Almost inarguably, the two most popular songs from “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One” are “Sugarcube” “and “Autumn Sweater.” The former is built on a big, fuzzy riff, equal to or greater than anything Pavement ever made, that blankets the kindest and most loving sort of promise from Ira to Georgia. It is rightfully extolled, although possibly one of the least interesting tracks on the record. “Autumn Sweater,” on the other hand, is an entirely more subdued affair, designed around an amped up church organ instead of guitar. Patient and simple on the surface, the song burns deeply because the melody is haunting while the story is so sweet. Amid the crowded parties and escapist fantasies, the singer evokes the discomforts and pleasures of introverts in love, in the city, as the hours grow later and the nights turn a tick colder.
Though less “popular,” “Deeper into Movies” is, to me, not simply the best song on “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One,” but the greatest song Yo La Tengo ever recorded. A breathless tsunami, inspired by My Bloody Valentine, it is a song that is almost too loud for a record. The song is a mile high wall of guitar feedback piled high on top of Ira and Georgia singing in indistinguishable harmony. In between the chime of the insistent riff, there are two guitar solos that sound like something between a freak out and a man wrestling with his guitar. For five minutes, the song just keeps reaching higher and higher, towards outer space until it reaches the greatest intersecting point between volume and melody.
Surrounding these magical moments are a pair Country instrumentals for those who consider Hudson Valley, New York to be the country, and a couple of darling, bossa nova whispers. In truth, the majority of the album is rather minimal and subdued, typified, perhaps by “Moby Octopad,” a song that insistently climbs up a circular bassline surrounded by feedback hum. The vocals are quiet and breathy -- almost tired. And then, midway through, the band saws the track in half with a dissonant piano line that recalls The Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” The startle of the piano, an avant garde touch, betrays the impossibly charming picture of coupledom that Ira and Georgia describe:
Eight o'clock, the lights are on at Shea
Phone turned down, we've nothing much to say
Dozing off, the TV drones
Huskey makes the turn and heads for home
There is no other band who could conceive of pairing an odd, atmospheric tune with a profoundly mundane picture of a couple, sitting together quietly and comfortably while a “could have been” catcher for the New York Mets rounds third base. For anyone who has ever loved baseball, introversion and New York, this is a reluctant anthem.
After several tracks wherein the dials are turned down and the listener can see the stars and breathe in the romance of the evening air, the greatest small club band of their time makes a hard turn. “Spec Bebop” is a ten minute race between an organ, two drums and constant feedback. Amazingly, the song totally grooves. Many writers, not incorrectly, liken the song to the propulsive Art-Rock that Can and Kraftwerk were making in the 1970s. There is certainly some of that in the recipe, but what “Spec Bebop” most resembles is Miles Davis’ early 70s Rock band channeling “Sister Ray.” The song is considered divisive or indulgent by some. But, to me, it is the flex of a band showing the reaches of their secret language. And having seen them perform this song live in 1997, I can attest to its magic powers. “Spec Bebop” sounds like levitation.
Eventually the band returns to Earth on the next song -- the album’s penultimate track -- “We’re An American Band.” They put their jeans and hoodies back on and resume the lives of an indie rock band. They visit colleges, get stuck in traffic and waste their days off. Like some of the best songs on “Electr-O-Pura,” this starts off as a tired, almost opiated affair and then builds and builds. Following the slow crawl of just bass, drums and slight guitar, Ira plugs in and slowly begins a deep, heady solo. The wind changes direction, pushing the guitarist or, maybe, keeping up with him. The cymbals crash. You can picture Ira’s eyes closed as he does battle with his instrument. The noise grows to the point where it becomes hard to imagine how the strings are staying on the guitar. It sounds not unlike a guitar fighting a viola fighting a buzzsaw. Georgia and James admirably hold the bottom. Finally, six and a half minutes later, the volcano rests in and we hear the final squall of what is ostensibly the last song of this sort that we would ever hear from Yo La Tengo.
Over an hour in, but right before they unplug, the band closes with the second of two wonderful covers on the album. “My Little Corner of the World” finds the trio exhausted from showy extroversion of their tour de force. They gather together, dial down and offer a final, completely appropriate, precious (in the best sense of the word) piece of Pop. Their version is true to the jangly, rickety spirit of the 60s original, but manages to completely invert the narrative. Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma, who scored a modest hit with the song in 1960, was a high profile anti-gay rights activist for much of her life. Yo La Tengo take the song back, stripping the insularity and hate from the original singer and replacing it with a dreamy, escapist romanticism.
“I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One” was made roughly five years after James McNew joined Yo La Tengo, solidifying the band as a tight, inwardly gazing unit. It was made over ten years after the group’s first album was released but closer to fifteen years after Ira and Georgia fell in love and formed the band. It was made over twenty years after Ira Kaplan was mainlining new music for The New York Rocker and The Village Voice. It was made nearly thirty years after the Miracle Mets were stunning the baseball world and Georgia Hubley was providing voices and inspiration for her parents’ cartoons. And it was made forty years after Ira Kaplan was born just a few miles from She Stadium. Every moment of those forty years is audible to me on “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.” It may not equal “Astral Weeks,” in its beauty or “”Sticky Fingers” in its virtuosity. It may not be as important or disruptive as the album it preceded by one month, “OK Computer.” But, it is a treasure for every introvert who has dared to peer outside and plug in to someone or something that was otherwise unimaginable.