Yo La Tengo Treat Austin to Evening of Mellow Grooves and Noisy Rock (SHOW REVIEW)

The first iteration of Yo La Tengo started all the way back in 1984 in Hoboken, New Jersey. Over thirty years later and the trio are still creating great music together and continue to maintain a loyal following. The decades have seen quite a few albums from YLT and they all contain their signature blend of folk, punk rock, shoegaze, long instrumental noise-jams, and electronic music. Currently touring their fifteenth full-length studio album, There’s A Riot Going On, YLT played a career spanning set for a sold out crowd at Austin’s iconic Mohawk on September 23. 

The show was billed as An Evening with Yo La Tengo, which meant that in lieu of an opener the crowd was treated to almost three hours of YLT. The night was broken into two separate sets with an intermission. The first set began with the shoegaze inspired “You Are Here” and was followed by “Forever,” both from the new album. While the set also included the mellow “She May, She Might” and “Ashes” from the recent album, YLT also included older songs “The Ballad of Red Buckets” and “Pablo and Andrea” from 1995’s Electr-O-Pura before finishing out the set with “I’ll Be Around” and “Before We Run” from 2013’s Fade. While the first set was largely soft and mellow, the audience was enraptured and no one talked during songs.

After a 20-30 minute intermission, Yo La Tengo returned to the stage with the instrumental, atmospheric jam “Dream Dream Away” before launching into “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” from the excellent And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. After performing “Today Is The Day” the set transitioned into a noisy raucous. “Stockholm Syndrome” turned into a distorted guitar jam with Ira Kaplan stomping on pedals and running around the stage. The distorted guitars and effects stayed present for the rest of the set as they performed the garage rock sounding “Ohm” from Fade and the noisy “Big Day Coming (Second Version)” from 1993’s Painful. The crowd found themselves playing Ira’s guitar as he walked around the audience singing the refrain from “Big Day Coming (Second Version)” before he returned to the stage to hit his guitar on a drum seat.

The yin and yang of the two sets was a great experience for a show, and the ramping up of energy really got the audience going at the end. The audience was unique unto itself. During the intermission a few could be seen reading books and phones in the air were noticeably absent during songs. Though Yo La Tengo has only had marginal commercial success throughout the decades, it is clear that they have developed a fiercely loyal fan base that will let them continue to make and perform music as long as they decide to stay together.

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