Yo La Tengo stopped at Beachland Ballroom for a sold-out show on Monday night (03/24/25), putting their blend of indie music and powerful noise rock on full display.
The show consisted of two sets and a three-song encore. This is a common structure for Yo La Tengo. The first set is the quieter one, with softer, more mellow songs and more acoustic guitars. The second set is the louder one, where the band can stretch out a bit and take some space to get weird. The difference between shows, however, is that every night has different setlists.
Listen to their albums, and what you’ll hear are quiet, almost ambiance songs that don’t always exhibit the full extent of how much of a noisy rock band they are when playing live. You can hear elements on the albums, especially on the new album, but you can’t fully appreciate it until you see them live.
What they are not is just another folk-inspired indie group that came out of that scene in the late 90s and early 2000s. No. In fact, the band has been around since the mid-80s. They influenced that scene. They’ve been putting out albums every few years, essentially with the same members nonstop since the mid-80s. They also get really wild on stage. Monday night was no different.
The first set started with “This Stupid World,” from the 2023 album of the same name. While the first set is the quiet set, they do get a tiny bit rowdy on this opening song. Lead guitarist Ira Kaplan, who would switch to acoustic later in the set, started in with the feedback and distortion almost right away, signaling the things to come. This is probably why starting with this song seems to be one of the few constants of the tour.
These extended noisy moments were the highlight of the evening, without a doubt. There were a couple in the first set, mainly with the previously mentioned opening song as well as the closing song, “Miles Away.” But it was the second set where they really set loose. These jams sometimes lasted so long you started to wonder if the band would remember what song they were playing, or that they were even playing a song at all. Then, they would just jump right back into it. Very cool. One thing that helped is that they had the driving reliability of the unflinching James McNew to keep that bass line going, and Georgia Hubley on drums, always maintaining the course. This was especially evident during the second set opening song, “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” where McNew’s bass line stayed constant and unwavering while Kaplan just got wild on a distortion-fueled solo on his Stratocaster.
That’s another thing. The band is only a three-piece, but each member does, at minimum, triple duty. The set started with Hubley on keys and McNew on drums, even though they’re typically the drummer and the bass player, respectively. Take the second song they played, “I Feel Like Going Home,” from the 2006 release ‘I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.’ It’s a slow, sad song, with a few verses that aren’t exactly revealing, but the tone isn’t a happy one, that ends with the line “Let me be to go home / I feel like going home.” When they played this song, Hubley sang vocals while McNew came out from behind the drum kit to play acoustic guitar. They shuffled around like that throughout the night, from keys to drums to guitar to vocals, revolving roles.
Another fun thing about the live show is that they seem to just play whatever songs they want. When you have a 40-year catalog to lean back on, it would be easy enough to pick out some catchy crowd favorites and just play them every night. So many bands do it. But with Yo La Tengo, you just never know what songs are going to pop up. Sure, they played some songs from the newer album, but it’s not like they write pop songs, and even the songs that are more popular or well-known probably won’t get played. If you don’t like that or don’t get it, then that’s your problem, and there’s just something really cool about that. It’s punk rock in the truest sense of the word. Because of all of this, after seeing them live, you sort of realize, but also wonder why, they never fully “broke through” to the mainstream. But what does that even mean for a band like this? They were never meant to break through. In fact, judging by the show they played last night, they’re almost daring you to like them, and it’s really infectious.
While they never broke through, they’re sure doing something right. Nearly every show on this tour is sold out already, and Beachland was no different. People were elbow to elbow. And it was easy to see why. You never know what you’re going to get. You do know it’s going to be wild. Even during the slower set, the crowd was in enraptured and reverent, seemingly hanging on every moment.
Yet another fun thing about their shows, and another constant, is that they seem to always do some covers. That’s a fact that makes me happy, as it seems there’s a distinct lack of bands doing cover songs in recent years. But, in true Yo La Tengo fashion, these won’t be the traditional or well-known songs you might expect. One of the songs they encored with was a Devo song, for instance, since we’re so close to Akron, but it was the lesser-known “Bottled Up.”
The three-piece are so tight at this point, and they all shined in whatever role they were tasked to play. Since feedback and distortion were pretty much part of the arrangements, they had a lot to manage, but they did it with the poise and expertise fitting of their standing in the indie music world. What their entire show boils down to is that they just seem to really love playing live music, and they have the catalog and the ability to do it. A band that has been around for such a long time could easily be jaded or just going through the motions, relying on some cheap standards. They are neither of those things. No, they truly do appreciate live music, which makes the audience do the same.
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