Indie rockers Yo La Tengo still rock 30 years later

Old concert posters and relics line the walls of the 9:30 Club's basement bar. Dressed in loose jeans and sneakers on a Friday night, Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan and James McNew scan the relics, searching for familiar names while reminiscing about the Washington club's original, much smaller, dingier and rat-infested location.

Kaplan drifts over to a metal chair under the stairwell and settles in, hands dumped into sweatshirt pockets. In a few hours the band will be upstairs performing a sold-out concert, one of a handful of east coast shows celebrating their 30th anniversary. But right now Kaplan is about to enter his personal purgatory: a press interview.

Looking at Yo La Tengo's rise from ramshackle Hoboken, New Jersey, cover band to indie-rock standard-bearer, Kaplan says this has always been a band without a plan. "We just play and fool around with things until we hear something we like," he says. "We just try to follow our ears, not a concept."

The trio blend the divide between listener and performer with more quiet power than almost any other band in rock, pulling from across eras and genres without sounding allusive. They percolate into your brain, like memories returning. Especially since the 1993 album Painful - which was reissued in a deluxe edition last month, on the 30th anniversary of the band's first gig - Yo La Tengo have condensed their omnivorous impulse into a new stance: they can play feedback-fuelled, 13-minute songs that are somehow comforting instead of transgressive.

And as indie rock has developed over the band's career, the trio have incorporated new streams of thought into its steadily persuasive sound. "We listen to all different kinds of music," says drummer and vocalist Georgia Hubley, speaking by phone a few days after the concert. "There's so much sound affinity that we share. Appreciation of music is at the core of the band."

Even the group's way of writing centres on listening. "I think we've perfected our process, which is basically just to get together, talk about movies or sports or food for about an hour, and eventually start playing, with no goal," McNew says before the show in Washington.