Yo La Tengo, Stuff Like That There - Album review

Download: I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry; Before We Stopped To Think; Awhileaway; I Can Feel The Ice Melting

Reprising the format of Yo La Tengo’s 25-year-old Fakebook album, this features just two new songs alongside a handful of re-recorded items from their back catalogue, and a preponderance of cover versions.

The latter, while an unusual selection, are all transformed into much the same low-key, folksy style – treatment which that works well on their cover of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”.

The best of their own material is the new “Awhileaway”, which has a gentle, desultory charm and pleasing lyrical play; but the covers are transformative: with glistening vibrato guitar tints and murmured vocal, Great Plains’ “Before We Stopped to Think” resembles a Lambchop outtake, while the early George Clinton song “I Can Feel The Ice Melting”, metamorphoses into a winsome thing akin to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Punky’s Dilemma”.