Yo La Tengo

But from shyness blossomed beauty, sometimes almost directly. “We hated college radio interviews, so we started learning songs we could sing,” Kaplan admits, describing the origins of Fakebook, 1990’s stunning acoustic collection of obscure covers and reworked originals. “Georgia kinda had to sing. I think we took our singing more seriously, and it probably did open stuff up.”

Afterward, the harmonies came in small, beautiful songs on each album, like flowers in fields of distortion. Aside from the 1989 classic “Barnaby, Hardly Working” (and a few others), they mostly just churned out decent tunes. By 1991, they’d given up hopes of finding a permanent bassist, when James McNew—guitarist for Providence’s Christmas—volunteered for temp duty over dinner at the house of mutual friends.

“Between mouthfuls of food they mentioned there was a tour coming up, and I sort of said, ‘I’ll do it,’” McNew recounts. “And that was pretty much the extent of that.” (Except for the part where McNew had to learn how to play bass, but he did so in short order.)

They gelled. “We were together for six years before the band started,” Kaplan chuckles wryly. “It really wasn’t until we were a band—the three of us—that we realized what we hadn’t been up ’til then.” With McNew in place, the group established a partnership with producer Roger Moutenot on 1995’s Electr-O-Pura (starring the ebullient “Tom Courtenay”).

On 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, the trio broke the album barrier, fanning expansively into an expressive, delicate unit, creating a cozy atmosphere of low-floating organs, Pet Sounds whispers and autumn sweaters. No longer was Kaplan merely feeding back behind Hubley’s husky vocals.

These shy kids were everywhere, making new friends, and—frankly—getting pretty weird. They cavorted with assorted Manhattan free-jazzers both live and in the studio (1999’s Some Other Dimensions in Yo La Tengo double 7-inch, 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out); created atmospheric scores for French underwater documentaries (2002’s The Sounds of the Sounds of Science); and eventually turned in an album that toned down the distorted guitars, instead opting for ever-intricate song constructions of light and clouds (2003’s Summer Sun).

With their recent albums, the rock historians in Yo La Tengo have managed to not only bypass cliché but actively reverse it, making gen-eric music with a rotating lineup first, and then discovering a unique voice. As a band, they’re two decades old and are making the best music of their career.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than at Maxwell’s. “Well, that was always a pretty comfortable place,” Kaplan says. “Relatively comfortable,” he amends. “As comfortable as we got.”

At the Hanukkah shows, the hushed shimmers of recent studio work stand side-by-side with surprisingly durable selections from the back pages. Guests fill out arrangements: All of Calexico crowds onstage during night two, while Tortoise’s Doug McCombs adds cool jazz vibraphone on night four, and original guitarist Dave Schramm lends stately folk-rock licks on nights one and three.

And then there are the covers: obvious (“Eight Days a Week” on nights one, two and eight); obscure (Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Hungry” on night three); and only seemingly obvious (a sped-up tear through The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” on night four, which turns out to be an arrangement borrowed from Roky Erickson).

Of course, Yo La Tengo isn’t necessarily meant to be consumed like this (one winds up sounding like a jabbering Deadhead), and generally they aren’t. On their best nights, one gets a sense of hearing the musical equivalent of Ernest Hemingway’s proverbial iceberg—an unfathomable dark mass lurking just beneath the surface.