Yo La Tengo

L-R: Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan, and James McNew. None of them surf.

Yo La Tengo is a Long Running Alternative Rock band from Hoboken, New Jersey. Founded in 1984 by former music reviewer Ira Kaplan (guitar, keyboards, vocals) and his wife Georgia Hubley (drums, vocals), they went though a series of bassists before settling on James McNew (bass, keyboards, occasional vocals). They've achieved almost no commercial success, but have become a touchstone of indie-rock nerds everywhere thanks to their large back catalogue, consistent output, and endearing songcraft, which is based on a beguiling mix of Kinks-esque pop-rock, Velvet Underground balladry, and Sonic Youth squall and fuzz. The latter helped popularise them in The Nineties, to the point that they toured with My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr in 1992.

This band provides examples of:

  • Concept Album: Painful and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, both about a troubled relationships.
  • Cover Version: at least one on every album. They've also recorded three albums entirely of cover songs: the gentle acoustic Fakebook, the garage-punk Fuckbook, and the collection of barely rehearsed radio requests aptly named Yo La Tengo is Murdering the Classics.
  • Creator Couple: Kaplan and Hubley
  • Epic Rocking: extended noise jams such as "The Evil That Men Do (Pablo's Version)", "Blue Line Swinger", "Spec Bebop", "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind", and "The Story of Yo La Tengo Tango".
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: "Sudden Organ" begins with a rather, well, sudden organ riff.
    • And "86-Second Blowout" is exactly 1 minute and 26 seconds.
  • Gratuitous Spanish: their name. It's apparently a very obscure baseball reference.
  • Happily Married: Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan. Averted in the case of the married couples in most of their songs.
  • Long Runners
  • Long Title: I Can Hear the Hearts Beating as One, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.
  • Joisey: they're from there, but they don't really fit the stereotype.
  • New Sound Album: several. Painful introduced a lot more guitar noise into the mix, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out featured slower tempos and drum machines, and I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass featured strings and horns much prominently than previous albums.
  • No-Hit Wonder: they've never achieved any sort of commercial success, but to the Pitchfork Media crowd they're gods.
  • Perishing Alt Rock Voice: all the band members have this.
  • The Pete Best: Dave Schramm, the second guitarist who left after their first album, as well as pretty much any of the different bassists they worked with before James McNew.
  • Pop Star Composer: they've done songs for several films.
  • Shown Their Work: Ira Kaplan knows an awful lot about the history of popular music.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: "The Story Of Yo La Tango", which is titled that way as a joke about their name frequently being misspelled. This in turn led to people getting the title wrong by correcting the spelling.
  • Stockholm Syndrome: "Stockholm Syndrome"
  • Three Chords and the Truth: they have their tendencies toward this.
  • Turn the Other Cheek: Mr. Tough
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