Little Eyes

Yo La Tengo have been making music in Hoboken, New Jersey since 1984 — one of the longest-running and most consistently excellent indie rock bands in American history. The core of the band is Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, who have been married since 1987, and their musical partnership has a quality that is genuinely rare: the longer they have made music together, the quieter and more concentrated it has become. Summer Sun, their tenth studio album, recorded at Alex the Great Recording in Nashville with producer Roger Moutenot, was greeted on its April 2003 release as something of a disappointment — too subdued, too gentle. Its reputation has grown substantially since. Some critics now consider it their best.

Little Eyes opens the album proper — the second track, following the brief instrumental intro "Beach Party Tonight" — and is one of the most quietly confident things the band ever recorded. Georgia Hubley sings it, which already signals something different: her drumming propels it with an urgency she's not known for, through a chorus with Kaplan more entangled than harmonized. The guitar line has a watery, melodic quality that reviewers reached for aquatic metaphors to describe. James McNew's bass moves underneath everything with characteristic precision. The whole track lasts four minutes and eighteen seconds and leaves no loose ends.

Every year since 1995, Yo La Tengo has performed a fundraising marathon at WFMU — their local Hoboken radio station — in which listeners call in pledges and request any song they want, live on air. The band plays whatever is asked: covers of songs they've never heard, obscure B-sides, anything. It is one of the most generous and genuinely strange annual rituals in American music, and it says something important about who they are. Little Eyes is a song in that spirit — unhurried, generous, made with care for the people who will listen to it, indifferent to whether anyone else is paying attention. It contains some of the band's most beautiful music.