When Rhino released Girl Group Sounds: One Kiss Can Lead To Another boxset, I was all over it. There’s a whole range of emotion that tends to get overlooked by the patina of choreographed pop, but when you have torch songs from Dusty Springfield, guttural yearnings from Connie Francis, and the soul singing of Diana [...]

Modest Mouse is an easy band to take for granted. Emerging from the Pacific Northwest twenty years ago, it’s perhaps tempting to consider them just another “indie rock” band buoyed by Nirvana’s lucky break. Like Yo La Tengo, Modest Mouse almost immediately transcended such a pejorative tag, plotting a cour...

Phil Morrison, who directed the movie Junebug, made the video for Yo La Tengo’s minimal-but-aching Fade ballad “I’ll Be Around,” and it’s a weirdly powerful piece of work. It starts out with Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan lip-synching the song in some beautifully-shot verdant woods while text ...

Yesterday, Hoboken indie greats Yo La Tengo released Fade, their utterly gorgeous new album. And last night, they celebrated that release by serving as musical guests on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. Former Trenchmouth drummer Fred Armisen, alongside another guy I don’t recognize, sat in on drums next to Georgia Hubley as the band play...

Yo La Tengo have accomplished a whole lot in the past three decades or so, but their greatest achievement might be this: They’ve figured out how to incorporate a lot of weird things into their music (modal Glenn Branca guitar freakouts, layered metronomic krautrock rhythms, ancestral-mystic British folk close harmonies) and made them a...