Sugarcube

“I THINK it was shown on MTV once, maybe twice,” says bassist James McNew, of the video for Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube”. “As far as I know, that’s it. That’s all.”

In the 25 years since, however, the promo has racked up millions of views on YouTube, no doubt helped by the presence of its stars David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, the latter now better known as lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He has, it turns out, been a Yo La Tengo fan since the early ’90s.

“We were all fans of Bob’s from The Larry Sanders Show,” explains Ira Kaplan. “Then Georgia and I were on vacation out in LA and we saw that Bob was doing stand-up at a bookstore, so we went out to see the show. Aft erwards he was just browsing the record section, and it was kind of out of character for us to do this, but we introduced ourselves. It turned out he knew our band.”

There’s more to “Sugarcube” than its video, of course. Since the mid-’80s, the Hoboken-based group had been charting a unique path, mastering the acoustic hush of 1990’s as adeptly as they did the brutal fuzz workouts of ’92’s . On their eclectic eighth album, 1997’s – now celebrating its 25th anniversary with a digital and vinyl reissue – they