After a long delay, I am finally writing about this album...
To understand and to appreciate Stuff Like That There fully, you have to connect it to Yo La Tengo's Fakebook, from 25 years ago. They even have said this is the 25 year anniversary follow-up to it.
I fell in love with Facebook, 18 years ago, when I picked up a copy while out with one friends before taking a quick road trip to San Diego. I convinced Nick and Mark to let me play Facebook, the entire ride that night. I don't think they got the album the way I got it. I was immediately hooked by the pedal steel, the countrified-folk-indie. The vibe. It set me out on a quest to find the original versions of all this fabulous covers. Over the years, Fakebook, remained one of my own personal cult-classic-ish albums.
To learn that Yo La Tengo were recording a follow-up of sorts? I was all in. Immediately.
Stuff Like That There is a nice, warm, comforting album. It's an album that I can cuddle with in a warm cabin somewhere. It's almost entirely acoustic. It sound the way watercolor landscapes look. It is nostalgia inducing. It is conversation starting. Or, even better, when conversation goes quiet, this album stands in and saves all from the silence.
One definite conversation starter is their version of The Cure's "Friday I'm in Love." So unexpected! So happy to hear this! It's exactly what a cover should be--paying respect to a song you admire by not recording an identical version. But instead to take the song, and reinterpret it to fit your own steez. Your own vibe.
Perhaps that's what is best about Facebook and Stuff Like That There. These are covers. But they are Yo La Tengo songs still. Even the Yo La Tengo originals are reinterpreted. But they are STILL Yo La Tengo songs. A prime example is the rethinking and reworking of their classic track "The Ballad of Red Buckets." It does the original from the album Electr-o-pura justice. And it fits into Stuff Like That There so well, it's almost like it it could not exist anywhere else.
One last piece of beauty I would like to mention here: Hank Williams' "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry." Georgia's gentle delivery and her interesting pace of delivery bring a new sentiment to this song entirely. There's a feeling of resignation now rather than yearning. Reverb rich guitar lines add color to this art piece.
This album would be paired perfectly with a mug of hot chocolate.
