Turning Love Into Art

o you know what it's like to be in love? Love can be a mystical concoction, a foamy, slurred mass of devotion and conflict. It is one of art's most popular topics for a reason: it's deft and inscrutable, elusive and gratifying. And it always, always gets people excited.

Turning love into art has been the grand project of Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan's many years of marriage. Most couples these days are lucky if they eat dinner together three nights a week; Georgia and Ira formed a band. And not just any band, mind you, but Yo La Tengo, one of the underground's most revered stalwarts, a perennial critics' favorite. With uncompromising artistic integrity and laudable perseverance, this couple has sketched a picture of what modern marriage-and the marriage of life and art-can make good in the world. Album after album, this band chronicles one long, brilliant love affair between two people and their music.

Today's Yo La Tengo, like many a long marriage, is as mellow and assured as ever. And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out is a document of unified complacency, making good on all the band's promises, but rarely venturing into revolutionary territory. The band's eleventh(!) album is lulling and somnolent, too pretty to offend or challenge. It's about falling in love all over again, and you can't help falling in love with it, either.

And Then Nothing isn't likely to win over the rock-for-rock's-sake set. It's as quiet as anything the band has done, plunging them deeper into arty, ambient territory. This album has a 17-minute closing instrumental and a muted, do-it-yourself sound to it. Nothing evokes quiet passion quite like Ira's backing vocals on the sugar-sweet "You Can Have It All." They're the type of shamelessness only a husband could want to be capable of: after Ira provides his sweet, measured accompaniment, the couple follows it with a beautiful verse-for-verse tradeoff that reaffirms that marriage can be equal after all.

Even without obvious, poppy crowd pleasers, And Then Nothing has its standouts. "Last Days of Disco" is a lulling narrative about the lump-in-your-throat moment of love at first sight. Over hushed atmospherics and barely-there guitar noise, the band recounts that brittle, perfect moment like only lovers can. "Our Way To Fall" hums its memories over Georgia's ghostly backup vocals, soft as hands held on a park bench in the fall. "Cherry Chapstick," the album's lone, Sonic Youth-esque rocker, captures love's nagging ambivalence in a rainstorm of controlled noise. Even on the noisy song, this album is nothing if not pretty.

Sometimes it's nice to think of love, weighty and complicated as it is. Yo La Tengo's all-star couple has been at the game long enough to know it's neither all ice cream cones, nor is it divorce court. Love is all about honesty and memories and telling stories. And as the latest chapter in Yo La Tengo's long, satisfying story, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out is sure to keep the pages turning for a long, long time.