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Yo La Tengo performs "Beanbag Chair" from their newest album, "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass"

Lately things have been pretty bleak for fans of the original indie rockers who achieved a much publicized rise to musical power in the mid-to-late 1990s: Guided by Voices made its final bow a few years back, Liz Phair has been flirting with mainstream production values for so long it’s starting to seem like she’s not joking anymore, and Pavement—the group who seemingly defined the sound, ethos and attitude of 1990s indie rock—has left the building. Happily, ringer-tee-wearing, record-store-dwelling denizens still have one band that they can count on.

The night before Artvoice caught up with Ira Kaplan, vocalist-guitarist-songwriter for the New Jersey-based trio Yo La Tengo, the band was sharing the stage with classic rock icon Robert Plant, alt-country whipping boy Ryan Adams and glam guru Ian Hunter. The occasion was a benefit concert for ailing rock visionary Arthur Lee held at New York City’s Beacon Theatre. While Yo La Tengo isn’t accustomed to playing bills of this stature, the group’s inclusion in the event is telling of their long-developed appeal, and the admiration and respect they command from the rock cognoscenti.

In many ways, however, Yo La Tengo never abandoned its indie-rock roots. In Yo La Tengo land, the seven-inch single is still an important window into a band’s ever-changing sound, the EP format is not simply one song from a current album padded with some filler or remixes but rather a vital indication of where a group is headed, and a band must still log plenty of miles on their van’s odometer to spread their musical message. So, to those who have followed the band since its formation in 1984, the group’s appearance at this sort of Rolling Stone-sanctioned event seemed to have a very fish-out-of-water feel to it.

“Well, a little bit yes and a little bit no,” explains Kaplan, speaking from his home in Hoboken. “We certainly felt that way walking into it, but we realized there were so many people that we knew who were taking part in it that it sort of is our pond, to a certain extent.”

Over the past 20 years, Yo La Tengo’s “pond” has expanded considerably. The group has swelled its originally small but devoted fan base into a worldwide following, garnered near-unanimous critical praise for its recordings. They’ve collaborated with such cultural icons as Ray Davies, Yoko Ono and The Simpsons, to name just a few. But it’s a different sort of collaboration that brings the group back to Buffalo this week.

On Tuesday, July 11 at 8pm, Yo La Tengo performs The Sounds of Science at Shea’s Performing Arts Center—a multimedia film and music event featuring the group’s accompaniment to 35-millimeter film projections by French documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé. This rare multimedia event is co-presented by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and Shea’s and co-sponsored by the Buffalo Museum of Science.

About the Filmmaker

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) directed more than 200 science and nature films with a decided focus on filming the world of deep sea life—one of the first filmmakers to do so. Painlevé’s films brought a new view to this rarely seen world and imbued the creatures of the deep with near-humanistic qualities. While Painlevé received little critical attention during his lifetime, his films have recently been celebrated as the work of a visionary. At the Shea’s performance, eight of Painlevé’s short films will be screened to Yo La Tengo’s accompaniment.

Musically, Yo La Tengo has always ventured into adventurous, imaginative soundscapes. Over the years, the group has meshed folk, country and rock songwriting styles with a penchant for jazzy, often psychedelic instrumental excursions. The group’s sound is instantly identifiable as its own—a rarity these days—and while Yo La Tengo has somehow avoided sounding “samey” over the course of its long career, it has managed to stay musically consistent, if not downright dependable, on its recordings.

Still, being the officially undeclared kings of indie rock has a downside, too. Throughout its career, Yo La Tengo has been dogged/blessed (depending on your point of view) with a reputation as a critic’s band. While there is a ring of truth to that assessment—the band’s records are virtually always greeted with celebratory salvos by rock scribes from the biggest entertainment rag to the tiniest ’zine, while selling only modest numbers compared to current chart-toppers—the notion that only learned music snobs can “get” the band’s music definitely does the group a disservice. After all, everybody knows that critics don’t actually buy records—rather, people who actually like music buy records. If anything, Yo La Tengo is a fan’s band, and with good reason.

Formed by husband and wife team Kaplan and Georgia Hubley (percussionist/vocals), the group began its career as a natural extension of the couple’s rabid obsession with music of all styles. Early on, the duo, joined by an assortment of friends and music devotees, created a batch of moody, personal and highly melodic songs. The band’s frequently understated music was alternately cut with the sort of avant-noise created by those 1960s bands so beloved by critics, the Velvet Underground, Love and the MC5.

Adopting its name from a baseball anecdote—wherein New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn would have to yell, “I got it!” in Spanish in order to avoid collision with his non-English speaking teammate, Elio Chacón—the band’s charm was never about style or attitude but about music first and foremost. Kaplan quickly developed into a songwriter who was able to convey a sweet, heartfelt sadness, a guitarist who could alternately pick out a delicate finger pattern or make his amp wail with wildly distorted tones and a vocalist of sincere range who always delivered his lines with honesty. Hubley’s percussion playing is another key element to the group’s sound. The drummer’s insistent, pounding rhythm never wavers but can quickly turn to slow and sympathetic playing when the tune requires it. As a vocalist, Georgia’s quietly delivered takes frequently provide the best and most memorable moments on any Yo La Tengo album.

Having released a string of critically hailed independent releases on tiny labels, Yo La Tengo was picked up by Matador Records in 1993, where it has remained ever since. In those years, the group earned the appreciation of an ever-widening fan base, flirted with the mainstream press and released some of the best albums of its career. During that time, the group also settled on a steady lineup with the addition of bass player-vocalist-songwriter James McNew. With McNew in place, the group acquired a musical comfort level and modicum of quiet fame, which allowed it to veer from the standard record/tour, record/tour ad infinitum game plan common to so many groups. Perhaps the fact that the band has always been allowed to spread its musical wings, so to speak, has been one of the contributing factors to its longevity.

For instance, back in 2001 the group was selected by the San Francisco International Film Festival committee to compose new music for the films of science and nature film documentarian Jean Painlevé. To those familiar with the group, Yo La Tengo’s alternately somber and joyously moody music seemed like a natural fit for Painlevé’s dramatic, occasionally surrealistic, underwater sea life studies. But Kaplan, for one, wasn’t so sure at first.

“At the time, just the idea of playing live to films was what excited us,” says Kaplan. “They started sending us tapes of movies of different films and narrative classics, none of which we could exactly see our way into. Someone at the festival raised the idea of these Painlevé movies. We weren’t familiar with him at the time but when we saw his work we had sort of a twin impulse, one being that the films were great and the other being that they would be almost too easy to score. It seemed so up our alley. Very quickly we realized that if we could come up with 90 minutes of original music, maybe that was challenge enough. Maybe ‘up our alley’ isn’t such a bad thing.”

While some artists would take up such an artistic challenge while carefully saving its best material for a new record, Yo La Tengo donated its musical heart and soul to the effort. The group released the material written for the Painlevé films on CD as The Sounds of the Sounds of Science (Egon) and have occasionally revisited the project on the road—to a few very select cities—in the years since. For Kaplan, the continually changing nature of the collaboration is its most appealing feature.

“One of the most interesting things about this process is to play material like this which has a set length, where normally you’d just let things unfold as they want to. Now we have to get to Point B at this exact moment. The films do have narration and do tell a story but they’re hardly narrative films. To use film score parlance, there’s not a lot of beats in these films. It’s one of the reasons that we keep doing this and coming back to it every year or so—because, almost by design, you precisely remember how it goes but allow it to change again.”

Having a band play live to projected films is not exactly a new concept. Back in the 1960s, the Velvet Underground—a band that Yo La Tengo stylistically portrayed in the film I Shot Andy Warhol—were among the first to explore the platform. What makes The Sounds of Science such a compelling media experience is the band’s sympathetic and ethereal instrumental playing mixed with Painlevé’s delicately choreographed films. Indeed, as Kaplan implies, Yo La Tengo and Painlevé seemed to have been tailor-made to collaborate at some point. Of course, as Painlevé passed away in 1989, the filmmaker was not available to participate in the process, which left the band free to come up with its own working methods.

“We watched the films for the mood and the pace and really everything about them we were able to connect with,” explains Kaplan. “Our usual method of working is just to start playing and so we’ve accumulated this huge backlog of jams. The first thing we did was go to some of those pieces and pair them with things that we thought worked with the different movies. Some of them are medleys in a certain sense, in that we took two pieces that we already had and strung them together. We basically came up with that strategy first and then started playing while watching the films and letting the pieces kind of adapt to the movies in an as organic way as we could.”

After the Shea’s performance, Yo La Tengo will perform The Sounds of Science as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival in Prospect Park. Apart from those two performances, don’t expect to see or hear anything about this unique concert event any time soon. Yo La Tengo is gearing up to release a new studio album in the fall with a lengthy tour to follow. The band’s upcoming album will provide a definite departure for the group—if in name only. I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass will be released on Matador records in September. It’s a seemingly incongruous name for a band whose music is so frequently sweet, low-key and charming; it sounds more like the title of a live Motorhead bootleg than the work of these much-loved and respected rock experimentalists. Perhaps that’s the point.

“James came up with the title and it met with instant approval,” says Kaplan. “Then our next thought was, ‘Dare we?’ I think in a lot of instances, any time we sort of catch ourselves thinking the sentence ‘Dare we?” then we really want the answer to be ‘Yes.’”

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a better summation of the lengthy career of these Hoboken musical pioneers.