Brian Slattery Photo
At one point during the first hour of the evening, a concertgoer turned to this reporter and asked, half rhetorically, “are you here for Yo La Tengo or Japanese Breakfast?” “Both” was a valid answer, as the bill at College Street Music Hall Wednesday night, uniting indie rock veterans with a recent indie favorite, brought together multiple generations of New Haven music fans and showed how two groups can arrive in the same expansive musical territory by different routes.
Yo La Tengo — Ira Kaplan on guitar, keys, and vocals, Georgia Hubley on drums, keys, and vocals, and James McNew on bass, keys, and vocals — took the stage in a manner befitting band members who, having formed the group in 1984 and released over 15 albums, are now elder statespeople of indie rock. They played with an ease that belied the sly complexity of their set.
They also came across as musicians who still took nothing for granted. “Our band — for those who are encountering us for the first time — is, and is still Yo La Tengo. Your not knowing about us doesn’t change that,” Kaplan said amiably, drawing laughter. He then introduced a song as being older than many of the people in the audience. That was about the extent of the banter; none more was needed.
Yo La Tengo started off pretty quiet; no one sang much above the volume of a speaking voice. The band members were also extremely egalitarian, passing around lead vocal duties and swapping instruments left and right. A wrenching wail of noise from Kaplan’s guitar in the third song, which drew spontaneous hollers, gave a hint of what was coming, as the set built steadily in energy, intensity, and openness. Kaplan drew laughs during a song in which he occasionally left his keyboard and ambled across the stage to hit a cymbal at just the right moment, as Hubley and McNew held down the song on keyboards and bass. As Hubley’s rhythms grew more insistent, the audience began to sway and heads bobbed. Smiles appeared on faces.
Yo La Tengo turned the dial up on its set until the last song ended in an extended noise freakout. A mysterious fourth member of the band wandered onto the stage to hold down a drone on a keyboard, Hubley and NcNew dug into a driving beat, and Kaplan pulled out all the stops on not one, but two guitars, detuning, creating feedback, almost throwing them to the floor, making rippling waves of distortion that pulsed through the crowd, somehow animating and deeply soothing at the same time. The audience was by then in a trance.
“That guitarist,” someone, apparently a young musician, behind this reporter said. “That’s the kind of shit I would like to be able to do.”
If Yo La Tengo showed themselves as masters of keeping things loose around the edges, Japanese Breakfast — the musical project of Michelle Chongmi Zauner, backed by a five-piece band that among them played guitar, bass, drums, keys, violin, and tenor sax — showed the benefits of running a tight ship. Last year Zauner was nominated for a Grammy and won a host of other music awards, and the set showed why. As a performer, she won the audience over almost instantly, connecting with them even across the barricade set up for stage security.
“It’s good to be back!” she said early in her set, mentioning that she had played before at Yale and at the Westville Music Bowl supporting Bright Eyes (“I get to play with my idols in New Haven,” she said). But her set was ample support for the argument that she’s quickly joining those idols, as she and the band performed song after song full of hooks, soaring melodies, and danceable rhythms. Where Yo La Tengo was about the interplay among the instruments, Japanese Breakfast performed as a cohesive unit, the sounds often blending together to the point where it was sometimes hard to tell which instrument was doing what. Audience members sang along throughout, and sometimes even sang the instrumental lines they knew from Japanese Breakfast records. Just as often they stood rapt and quiet, breaking out into sweeping applause at the end of every song.
Zauner passed along kind words for Yo La Tengo, whom she listed among her musical heroes as well; they were a band that she said constantly inspired her to be a better musician. This led into a more experimental part of the Japanese Breakfast set, featuring music Zauner had made for video games. These were less songs than full-blown compositions. In a set of strong material, to this reporter’s ear, these pieces were the strongest, strange and sweeping, guttural and ethereal, full of unexpected beauty. The audience followed her all the way.
As Japanese Breakfast neared the end of its set, it returned to the kind of party songs it had started with. The band closed on a banger, almost guaranteeing an encore. When Zauner returned to the stage, she brought out another New Haven memory, from earlier in her career. “We played a house show here in a place called Panty House,” she said, drawing cheers of recognition. “It’s not lost on me how incredible it is that you all are here.”
Her encore began with just her on the guitar; one by one her bandmates joined her, and the two-song mini-set built, as Yo La Tengo’s had, from quiet to as loud as possible. There was a sense of coming full circle, of marking the ample emotional ground that Japanese Breakfast and Yo La Tengo met within, and of doing a lap through the past to return to the present just a little stronger.
