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Despite Prisoners of Love's dorky sibilant subtitle, the veteran rockers in Yo La Tengo have rarely displayed aesthetic lapses over their vibrant eighteen-year career. If anything, they seem to barely exist. With understated charisma, Ira Kaplan's subdued vocals and perfectly manipulated guitar mesh completely with wife Georgia Hubley's whispered voice and uncomplicated but dead-on drums. And when ex-Christmas, current Dump maestro James McNew joined the fray in 1991, his ingredients blended perfectly with the existing atmosphere.
Perhaps more than any rock 'n' roll band, Yo La Tengo excel at shape-shifting. Ambling between Velvet Underground homage, gregarious shoegazing, Dead C rawk excursions, sunny acoustic pop, domestic electronics, and the most detailed feedback since Daydream Nation, the voracious Hoboken trio has effortlessly plugged into new sounds and mastered each.
With an oeuvre that rich, it's about time for Prisoners of Love's modest mid-career retrospective: Spanning 1985's self-released 7" to 2003's Matador-era gems, the selections are mostly solid (and ex-Forced Exposure editor Byron Coley's nudist-camp liner notes a hoot), but if you own it all, why bother? Well, the 26 tracks (a third limited-edition disc of rarities rockets the number to 42) are arranged sonically, not according to a sequential timeline. Cravers of clear-cut histories might chaff, but the approach creates enjoyable juxtapositions. For instance, 2000's "Our Way To Fall" finds its drifting notations coat-tailed by 1993's spiraling guitar lope "From A Motel 6," etc.
Then there's the bonus disc, accompanied by Kaplan's handwritten track-by-track background anecdotes. Though much of the material is available to hardcore collectors, those of us with less time on our hands will appreciate such hard-to-find gems as an acoustic version of Electr-O-Pura's "Tom Cortenay," a radio-show take on "Decora," a loopy remix of "Autumn Sweater" by My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields, a "Big Day Coming" demo, and a serene take on Sun Ra's "Dreaming," sung by Hubley.
Not all the covers work (Stevie Nicks?) and some of the proper album's wankier experiments could've been jettisoned for sharper nuggets, but whenever a dud shows up, it's so quickly and thoroughly engulfed by the cozy racket that follows that one will hardly find time to complain.
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