ith this review, I was all too ready to declare things like “The impossible has happened: Yo La Tengo has released a disappointing album” -- the kind of unfair, dramatic statement that can’t help but be made when one of your favorite bands lets you down. Over the last ten years, Yo La Tengo has provided me four masterpieces (Painful, Electr-O-Pura, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, ...And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out) and the best soundtrack ever written about aquatic life (The Sounds of the Sounds of Science), and I suppose it just got to the point where the band had given me so much that I could only assume there would always be more.


Yo La Tengo has never fallen victim to the same missteps other bands commonly experience -- the trio has yet to release a failed experiment, a gone-wrong attempt to appeal to a larger mass, or even (since the late ‘80s anyway) a hit-or-miss album. And this consistent delivery was what set the group apart from everyone else; YLT understands what to do with music better than any other band I know, and that’s why a brilliant release from them seems almost a given.


So how could Summer Sun be anything less than exceptional? The album displays all of the accomplishment YLT has accumulated over almost twenty years together, and the band probably hasn’t lost its ability to write great songs (at least, I hope not); simply put, everything that made YLT exceptional just can’t be found here. The verve is missing, and it’s not because the album lacks rave-ups; ...And Then Nothing was actually slower than Summer Sun, but it had such emotion that tempo was never a concern. The enthusiasm just seems to be gone -- mid-tempo, ordinary numbers drift by, and more than anything else, Summer Sun sounds tired.


Songs like “Moonrock Mambo” have nothing much to say, and really, no point at all. Many of the tracks on Summer Sun are similarly unclear with their purpose, satisfied with being “pleasant” instead of trying to induce emotion in listeners, or achieve anything that Yo La Tengo are capable of. Worse are songs like “How to Make a Baby Elephant Float”, which aim to be as negligible as they are, characterized by such a mild tone that they couldn’t possibly be deemed anything better than “good” -- a word YLT should be trying to exceed by more than a little bit. And I don’t necessarily say that in the “They’re better than that sort of thing” way, because it’s a little bit unfair to do that to great bands...regardless of history and reputation, few things are worse than a band that’s comfortable with being “decent”. Still worse, though, is the idea of the token 10-minute jam, which appears with “Let’s Be Still”, a song that lacks a good melody, but continues on for the sake of continuing.


Good melodies are still relatively common, though, and for that, Summer Sun is a slightly above average album. “Don’t Have to Be So Sad” is an excellent slow piece, akin to and on par with many of the songs on ...And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. “Little Eyes” features such a catchy chorus and so many Yo La Tengo-isms that it nearly overpowers all the mediocrity found on the album, reviving it with all the vitality of YLT’s past work, all the life that’s missing from Summer Sun.


There’s enough good material on Summer Sun to get something out of listening to it, but certainly not enough to keep up YLT’s 10-year streak of brilliance, and not even enough to really call the album worthwhile. Hopefully next time the group’ll put its efforts toward more significant goals than sounding pleasant, because although Summer Sun isn’t very good, I think it’s proof enough that YLT can still make great music. We’ll just have to wait for the next album to hear it...