Indie heroes Yo La Tengo have funk legends Sly & the Family Stone to thank for their album title. There’s a Riot Going On’s title came from Sly & the Family Stone’s seminal 1971 album There’s A Riot Goin’ On, and it’s got a similar atmosphere of uprising and oppression to it. Instead of the downfall of the ‘free love’ era back in the early 1970s, however, the backdrop of There’s a Riot Going On is today’s political landscape. Yo La Tengo concocted the record during typically impulsive rehearsal sessions. Instead of building demos, and creating songs from the usual songwriting method, Yo La Tengo created songs in a slower manner, blending parts from rejected film scores or discarded tracks by the band. As such, There’s a Riot Going On, has an ambient feeling, as well as a sprawling, lounging dynamic.

Produced by the entire band, with John McEntire on mixing duties, There’s a Riot Going On marks the first entirely original Yo La Tengo LP since 2013’s Fade, and the title is about as misleading and provocative as it gets. The album is not a contemplation of anger, or even a study, so much as an introverted withdrawal from the turbulence. Therefore, the title of the album could lead people to be disappointed. This, after all, has none of the feelings of a protest album, or, indeed, the brilliant funk album it’s named after. However, moving away from that, it’s another likeable addition to the Yo La Tengo oeuvre.

Opening with ‘You Are Here’, the album begins with a loitering number, which starts the reclining nature of the record. It’s a sauntering instrumental that delicately develops from a lone drone into a quixotic fusion of guitars and synths that coil above a reliable, but faint, bout of percussion. Likewise, ‘Shades of Blue’ is a quiet, almost folky tune that deviates shrewdly into hypnagogic trance as Georgia Hubley reflects on desolation and heartache. She sings: “Choosing the colour/ for my particular point of view/ Just kidding myself/ They’re all shades of blue” with a solemn twinge of elegance and artistry.

There’s a playfulness to There’s a Riot Going On, and none more so than with ‘She May, She Might’, which frolics with components of psychedelia as Ira Kaplan hums softly amongst a pasticcio of earthy guitar, delightfully mixed with breezy synths, atmospheric bass and the elasticity of Hubley’s drums. Elsewhere, it’s ‘Out of the Pool’ that stakes its name for the funkiest track on the record, and one that almost lives up to its namesake, with the band ever so softly amalgamating their brand of delicate ambience with a pang of funk.

There’s a distinct line between delicate ambience and, well, elevator music, and Yo La Tengo straddle that line very well on There’s a Riot Going On. However, ‘Let’s Do it Wrong’ sounds like it’s the offshoot of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. It’s gaudy, garish and about as motivated as a couch potato and, for a record promising a “riot”, it’s more beach holiday than the front-line. Likewise, the 1:26 long ‘Esportes Casual’ sounds like an abandoned theme tune to a cancelled game-show.

This is about as subtle as a riot gets but, for the most part, it’s also a brilliant exploration of the awkwardness, quietness and loneliness of political disturbance. Yo La Tengo have got to be regarded for the power they place in the music. They have an impassioned confidence that music, and especially theirs – which offers sparse and open landscapes with all the time in the world to mull stuff over – will pull us out of turmoil by affectionately pulling us into their world.

Liam McMillen

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