Nothing But Them and Us: Yo La Tengo’s Summer Sun Turns 20
Looking back on a most underrated YLT album
There are different flavors of flops by beloved artists.
One of my favorites is when the act in question pushes their sensibilities as far as they can go until they short-circuit their fanbase: Lady Gaga’s Artpop, Spoon’s Transference, Eminem’s Encore, Animal Collective’s Centipede Hz. (Sleater-Kinney’s scorched-earth initial finale The Woods fits this category but thankfully has more fans than detractors, though they exist). Obviously, there’s also the bald-faced pop pivot (Liz Phair’s Somebody’s Miracle), the misbegotten experiment (Neil Young’s Trans), the undercooked rehash (Clinic’s Winchester Cathedral).
But one of the most confounding is the scapegoat: When an artist has been good or consistent for so long that the album itself is overpowered by widespread fan exhaustion, as if they’ve been awake too long on a great band and badly need to sleep so they can enjoy the comeback album that course-corrects it. Sonic Youth’s NYC Ghosts and Flowers and R.E.M.’s Monster fall into this category, though they’re just experimental enough to understand why their fans may not have wanted to follow them into beat poetry or sexually questioning glam. I don’t forgive those fans, necessarily, because they’re so wrong. All of the albums I’ve named are actually good, many of them great. Some among the artist’s best.
The one whose reputation I don’t understand at all is one of those scapegoats, Yo La Tengo’s 2003 Summer Sun, which focused on a particular angle of the band’s existing sound that wasn’t attractive to indie-rockers who needed that one cranked-up “Cherry Chapstick” on the rapidly quieting band’s every album to continue living in denial, I guess. One of my favorite critics thinks Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! was the best album of 2019 but considered Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever a “boring record.” Obviously, taste is subjective. But plenty of truths in art are more objective than others. “Quietest album” is a dumb game with these hushed legends who’ve turned rock and roll into a series of history-conscious drones and lullabies.
Sure, maybe Summer Sun is their quietest. I’m pretty sure its widely beloved predecessor …And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out is even softer, though, if you remove “Cherry Chapstick” from the bell curve. I don’t know much. But I know Summer Sun, which just turned 20, is one of the most beautiful albums ever made.
So maybe the problem was it’s too happy? Inside-Out establishes an eerie, minor-key ambience from the git with “Everyday.” Summer Sun is keynoted by “Beach Party Tonight,” a swirling hum of melted exotica and buried horns whose title I thought ironic at the time. It’s not. Summer Sun is every bit as twilit as Inside-Out with the striking, piano-and-drum-machine minimalism of “Don’t Have to Be So Sad” and “Nothing But You and Me” But it finds so many other things to do than rock. “Winter-A-Go-Go” is a tight little Marshall Crenshaw-style pop song jammed with little rhythmic and chordal twists beneath the loungey veneer of whistling keyboard and brushed drums. “Season of the Shark” is a classic YLT anthem arranged for tiny sounds, Lego instruments instead of amplified wood and metal. How the swinging, hilarious, sampladelic funk of “Moonrock Mambo” didn’t become a massive fan favorite is beyond me; it namedrops Chunky bars, Professor Frink, and Horton Hears a Who, all in the goofy-romantic service of its “I wanna be next to you” refrain.
Maybe that’s best explained by three lines in the celestially buoyant “How to Make a Baby Elephant Float”: “I’m not averse to pillow talk / But I prefer a private joke / The memory it evokes” We’re all outsiders looking in to Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley’s decades of successful romantic and musical marriage. But the way they stumble through the boldest primary colors of their record collection to pay tribute to love throughout Summer Sun may be what really embarrassed the faithful. Here be flutes and brass on ten brightly jazzy minutes of “Let’s Be Still.” There go simulated Hawaiian slack-key slide guitars on “Today Is the Day,” which is so firmly one of the greatest songs they’ve ever done that they made a rawk version on a non-album single just to make sure everyone properly fucking heard it.
The real opener, “Little Eyes,” isn’t exactly Superchunk. But Hubley’s drumming propels it with an urgency she’s not known for, through a chorus with Kaplan more entangled than harmonized. Anyone who doubted her virtuosity in a mildly legendary Hoboken trio can proceed directly to the slippery groove of “Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo,” one of the few YLT instrumentals you can describe as a workout. Summer Sun’s follow-up, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, is laden with garage-psych goofs presaged by that one as surely as I Can Heart the Heart Beating as One’s Casio-tropicalia “Center of Gravity” presaged this album. The sneaky continuity of this band is a mitzvah. Up to and including this year’s crackling This Stupid World, their throughline shows everyone else how it’s done. And well into their 60s, you might as well say that about Kaplan and Hubley’s marriage, too; speculation is all that they allow.
At the best PR event I’ve ever attended, a live-band karaoke shindig in a piano bar for YLT’s 2015 covers outing Stuff Like That There, I chose “Today Is the Day” to sing and shouted “Summer Sun is underrated” at the end. James McNew woo’d back. Summer Sun itself closes with a cover of its own, a countrified, Glen Campbell-esque version of “Take Care” by the ultimate record-collector private-joke band, Big Star. (From the ultimate record-collector album, too, Third/Sister Lovers.)
It would be poetic justice if this great band’s most taken-for-granted album evolved into a misunderstood cult artifact in itself. That would be a private joke worth replacing pillow talk.
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