Yo La Tengo: Fade

"Even when feedback is screeching at the fringes, a certain serenity prevails throughout 'Fade,' the 13th album by the long-running Hoboken band Yo La Tengo. Time, mortality and lifelong companionship are very much on the minds of Yo La Tengo’s husband-and-wife songwriters, the guitarist Ira Kaplan and the drummer Georgia Hubley, who started the band in 1984 and are now in their 50s. 'Days just fade away, slide into gray,' Mr. Kaplan sings in 'Stupid Things,' continuing, 'Where does that time go before our eyes?' Stability isn’t a prime topic for rock songs; there’s more drama in crushes and breakups, revenge and self-pity. But through the years Yo La Tengo has, both quietly and noisily, chronicled the decades as a couple, as a rock band and as ordinary people maturing. As singers Mr. Kaplan and Ms. Hubley have each leveraged vocal limitations into a heartfelt yet undemonstrative style; as songwriters they allude to sounds and approaches from a broad, record-connoisseur’s canon, from 1960s-rooted pop-rock to new wave concision to extended guitar freakouts, though 'Fade' keeps its songs under seven minutes"  (Jon Pareles, "New Music," New York Times, 1/14/13).

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