s a service to you, the Stylus reader, I feel compelled to begin my review of Yo La Tengo’s Summer Sun with a public safety warning: Do not attempt to listen to this record while on a long car trip. I made the mistake of trying to first evaluate it while cruising down the Jersey Turnpike on my way to Washington, D.C. Result? I nearly fell asleep and drove off the road no fewer than three different times.


Saying that an album functions as a good cure for insomnia sounds harsh, but doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with slowed-down, dreamy background music. And as background music goes, Yo La Tengo’s is better than most. But it’s not an overstatement to point out that Summer Sun lacks the energy and drive of the band at its classic best (the period roughly between 1993 and 1997). Beginning with the majority of 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out and the entirety of last year’s The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, Ira, Georgia, and James clearly decided to move away from the sometimes discordant guitar thrashings and kick-you-in-the ass power pop of their earlier work in favor of, well, mood music for hipsters.


Of course, Yo La Tengo has always had a taste for the slow and charming. But their love song croons, long a staple of the band’s sound, essentially functioned as placeholders in between the fuzzed-out raveups and blissful guitar pop that characterized albums like Painful and Electr-o-pura at their absolute best. The key to Yo La Tengo’s greatness was mood variation. When listening to one of their albums you had an equally good chance of being treated to seven minutes of Ira Kaplan getting all Sonic Youth on everyone’s ass with his mind-bending guitar freakouts as you did of hearing three minutes of impossibly catchy power pop or laid-back, instrumental ambience. On Summer Sun, that variation has virtually disappeared. In its place the band leaves thirteen tracks of pretty but occasionally overlong and ultimately boring pleasantness that allows the better part of the album to run together into a kind of lightweight mush.


There are exceptions, and they make Summer Sun worth checking out, especially for Yo La Tengo diehards like myself. The second song on the record, “Little Eyes”, features Georgia Hubley’s breathy vocals over four minutes of toe-tapping dream pop that unfortunately does not offer a representative preview of the rest of the album. “Season of the Shark” breaks out a bouncy, if somewhat mellow, groove that has the band at close to their jazziest. The end of the record, too, picks up nicely. First comes “Georgia Vs. Yo La Tengo”, a snappy little instrumental featuring a jaunty piano and an insistent beat, followed by Hubley’s gorgeous “Winter A-Go-Go”, which may be the highlight of the entire record. Here however, the band squanders its momentum by inexplicably choosing to include “Let’s Be Still”, a ten-minute exercise in pointless folk-pop that has me reaching for the skip button on my CD player every time the track comes on. Yo La Tengo can certainly stretch out—Electr-o-pura’s “Blue Line Swinger” is stone-cold epic, but “Let’s Be Still” is simply meandering.


And while the last few tracks of the record, with the exception of “Let’s Be Still”, are fairly strong, the middle of Summer Sun drags proceedings to a crawl and ultimately sucks a lot of energy out of the album. “Nothing But You and Me,” “Today Is the Day,” “Tiny Birds,” and “Don’t Have to Be So Sad” are basically a whole lot of nothing in particular. The impression one gets from most of Summer Sun is that a moony-eyed Ira and Georgia created a large chunk of the album by just noodling around on guitars and singing meditative love songs to one another with a tape recorder turned on. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but the band is clearly capable of greater things. Never on this record do we hear the transcendent noise-pop of a “Sugarcube” or “Tom Courtenay” or the hypnotic grooves of an “Autumn Sweater.”


All things considered, Summer Sun is still worth a listen. The record, while disappointingly mellow, is still well-crafted and earns a place on my “good rainy day music” list. But in comparison to Yo La Tengo’s earlier groundbreaking output, the album is an overall disappointment. This is the problem with being one of independent music’s greatest bands—expectations go up. If anything, the relative weakness of Summer Sun merely reveals that Yo La Tengo are victims of their own success.