Ennui, Romance, and Troy McClure: Yo La Tengo’s “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out” at Twenty

Set your sights upon the cover of Yo La Tengo’s 2000 studio album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out and you will sense something otherworldly. In this cropped reproduction of photographer Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (Beer Dreams), a man stares upward as he is bathed in ostensibly extraterrestrial light, a half-finished six pack of Budweiser hanging from his right hand. If he is not to be abducted, he is certainly enraptured by the somnolence of the suburb at night; power lines overhead, the soft light of a living room lamp glowing from the home behind him. In many ways ‘domesticity’ feels like a dirty word, evocative of regressive gender politics and moral stricture in an age when both have been all but marginalized in modern American culture. Yet for the trio from Hoboken, to reckon with the forces of love and mundanity is to stare one’s daily routine in the face and wonder if there is a silver lining to having settled down. And so the use of Crewdson’s Twilight tableaux as the basis for the album’s artwork comes full circle: a visual underpinning of a renewed search for wonderment and meaning in recursive and comforting familiarity.

Created alongside Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley’s return to the decidedly-more-suburban Hoboken from Brooklyn, the record’s retention of the Yo La Tengo spirit and simultaneous dispensation with the signature Yo La Tengo sound are reflections of the move from a studio space dominated by city noise and that of what Kaplan estimates were “eight other bands,” in an interview with The Guardian. Then Nothing therefore exists not only as a deconstruction of middle-class emotion but also as a remaking of the band’s image as revellers in the raucousness of noise pop and  post-shoegaze indie rock. See Painful, Electr-o-Pura, even 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One as signposts of a successful, tremolo-and-feedback-laden career as critical darlings that were content with remaining forever short of reaching the mainstream. Follow these with the droning organ and three-note percussive idiosyncrasies of album opener “Everyday” and you would be forgiven for fearing an interesting but ultimately blasé ambient pop experiment á la Slowdive’s Pygmalion (erm, sorry Pygmalion). But if anything, these pop atmospherics prove far more meditative than they do boring—if they can be called boring at all—particularly when accompanied by bassist James McNew’s embrace of the prosaic as a replacement for the tumult of the past: “I want summer’s sad songs behind me / I want a laugh a minute without fail.” So establishes a motif of broad emotional calculus, with a particular focus on romance and marriage that undoubtedly draws influences from that of Kaplan and Hubley’s own union. It is qualified by so many adjectives: melancholic, sweet, funny, pensive, confident.

When taken in context of Then Nothing’s sonic homogeneity, the latter descriptor is what makes this album a particularly strong effort. The opener’s characteristic drone carries through “Our Way to Fall” and “Saturday” in various forms, largely as a foundation upon which to build diverse experiences in psychedelia and rhythmic hypnotism. Such elements ground “Saturday,” a seeming account of wallflower-ism at a weekend gathering, not only in a place of emotional and existential unease but also—with its delayed snare and helical synth rolls—musical intrigue. Throughout, the trio effectively meld their experiences in rock eclecticism with the fundamentals of dream pop to develop a cohesive yet highly individualized set of songs imbued with a certain nocturnal spirit. I hesitate to call them ‘chill’ as many others have—chill, the Sonic Youth-inspired “Cherry Chapstick” is not—but they are of a decidedly deep synaesthetic blue, the type of engrossing and serene hue that invokes reminiscence and, oddly enough, humidity. By many accounts, this is an album very closely associated with the dense sensory range of a late summer evening; juxtaposed against the stereotypical idea of the summer as a season to love and lose, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, with its mature deference to life’s natural rhythms, seems even easier to peg as the album for those who crave even the slightest bit of emotional stability for once in their damn lives (now you know the reason for my writing this piece, the album’s 20th anniversary notwithstanding).

Though its title and sound connote some great worldly expanse, the record is in fact tightly coiled around a few concepts of household anguish, contentment, and culture. So comes the band’s cheeky but reverent nod to The Simpsons as one of America’s great household cultural denominators with “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House,” a reference to fictional actor Troy McClure’s voluminous résumé and a fantastical account of a supposed rivalry between the Dawn bandleader and Four Seasons frontman Frankie Valli, who is ultimately driven to commit an act of arson on the eve of Orlando’s appearance at a state fair. Easily my favorite song from the album, maybe my favorite Yo La Tengo song overall, “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” is not only funny and culturally competent but also cognizant of the pitfalls of glory day reminiscence. You could also just say that it’s a very, very good pop song and you would still have made a brilliant point.

At its end, the monolithic 17 minute-long exploration that is “Night Falls on Hoboken,” And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out remains as absorbingly enigmatic as life itself. While the title is derived from a quote by the legendary Sun Ra (“...At first there was nothing...then nothing turned itself inside-out and became something”), it implies not the birth of a universe but the effort to make explicable our affinity for routinization in an existence that is so fleeting. If we are to “embrace the nothing of the everyday,” to truly turn it inside-out and expose the seams in life’s interwoven and darned fabric, we should find that they are sewn together in a manner that we can never replicate and thus will never understand; frankly, that’s alright. I find that we—humanity, I mean—spend far too much of our limited time attempting to make sense of abstractions that are likely destined to forever elude us.

The veil of night descends upon Hoboken. Let’s just sleep one night peacefully. Can’t we try?