My first visit to the Mousonturm in Frankfurt-Nordend was a pleasure and it won't be the last considering that Howe Gelb, Evan Dando and Cat Power will play there soon. Everyone's favourite indie band from Hoboken, NJ was great as ever. It was the fourth time I saw them live. And they surprised me again by not only performing the rather slow and soft (but mostly perfect) songs from their last album Summer Sun but by mixing them with older, harder material. The tour for their previous album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out from 2000 had been a little bit of a disappointment as they had played the whole sleepy (albeit phantastic) album from beginning to end.

The support act was M. Ward of whom I only knew that he had released an album at Howe Gelb's label Ow Om Records. He reminded me of the two guitar heroes Ben Harper and Chris Whitley. His voice was pretty irritating and quite similar to Ben Harper's without the warmth. It took some time to get used to it. It was hoarse and high at the same time. He seemed to whisper. His play of the acoustic guitar was quite violent. The fingers of his his right hand looked like the fast moving tentacles of an octopussy when they hit the strings. Musically there were some folky influences but altogether M. Ward sounded original and unconventional. Though I must admit that I wasn't overwhelmed.

When Yo La Tengo came on stage one of their first songs was Today Is the Day. My fave of Summer Sun, sung by Georgia, which they deconstructed totally. It was pure noise and hardly recognizable. Another phantastic guitar-feedback song they played was Flying Lesson with the guitar loop looming in the background like a fire siren from 1995‘s noisy and catchy Electr-O-Pura which is probably still my favourite album of theirs. Season of the Shark was even better than on the new album. Ira started coughing when they tried playing it for the first time. A girl in the audience shouted Hanky Panky Nohow. And that was what they played after James had nodded to let Ira's voice recover. Georgia sang the John Cale classic standing in front. To my surprise the instrumental Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo was James playing the drums, Ira the keyboards and Georgia distorting on the synthesizer. Other songs were: Big Day Coming, False Alarm, Yellow Sarong, Sun Ra’s Nuclear War, their remix hit Autumn Sweater which was never a fave of mine. James and Georgia were drumming on that one. They played most songs of the new album except Let’s Be Still.

I was quite jealous when I saw that Ira got a seductive Weißbier for his first encore. I only had some shitty bottled beer. For the next song in the program a little joint would have been nice. Strange but for the first time at a YLT concert I did not smell any good stuff. Blue Line Swinger was like slow sex. It took Ira about ten minutes before playing the riff. His guitar was meandering around continents of noise no-one had ever been to. It was like as if he tried to withhold an orgasm. He was kneeling on the floor when mistreating his guitar. This song is still one of the most hypnotic in their repertoire. My ears were so numb after the song that I could not hear my own clapping anymore. The beautiful end was Stockholm Syndrome which had been proposed by someone in the audience. The song about the hostages sympathising with their captors. James sang on it.

Yo La Tengo play with the expectation of the listener. They destroy and deconstruct their own songs so that you can hardly recognize them anymore. I am sure they also do this as they have become bored to play the same versions of the same songs again and again. They are permanently reinventing themselves.

After the show I added another T-shirt to my Yo La Tengo T-shirt collection and I purchased the EP Merry Christmas from Yo La Tengo with three songs and a cartoon about a guinea pig and his Xmas present. The joke is that the guinea pig is Jewish.

P.S. Andreas war übrigens auch da. Und hat über das Konzert in seiner bewährt knappen und kondensierten Form geschrieben.

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