Yo La Tengo
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
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Yo La Tengo
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
Matador, 2006
RiYL: Burt Bacharach, Spacemen 3, Lou Reed |
The charmingly titled I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is Yo La Tengo's eleventh proper album, and it sounds familiar in all of the right ways. Longtime fans will recognize the pattern displayed by the trilogy of Inside-Out, Summer Sun, and Beat Your Ass from earlier on in Yo La Tengo's long history. Before Inside-Out, the worst – or at least the dullest – offering in the Yo La discography was 1992's May I Sing with Me, which introduced deranged feedback jamming to the formerly meek folk-rock outfit's repertoire without bringing quality songs along with it. Painful, the first truly great Yo La Tengo record, followed, harnessing the noise to fine songs and real emotions. 1995's Electr-O-Pura completed the progression, absorbing the new sound into the whole of what Yo La Tengo had accomplished before buying fuzz pedals and securing the group's place in the pantheon.
And now they've done it again. Beat Your Ass, as the title and the squealing opening track announce, is much louder than its two predecessors. Its best moments however stem from the continued development of the refined, cerebral, dare-I-say-it adult approach of Inside-Out and Sun, whether its the horn arrangements on several songs, Georgia Hubley's torch-singer croon on "I Feel Like Going Home," Ira Kaplan's bold mumbling throughout, or especially a fabulous pair of James McNew-sung tracks, "Black Flowers" and "Mr. Tough." The inclusion of more rocking tracks like the groovin' "The Race Is On Again," which unabashedly recalls those mid-nineties salad days, provides the contrast for the more delicate numbers that the last two albums sorely lacked. "The Room Got Heavy" ends with a welcome squonky solo from the band's beloved new wave organ, missing in action for the last few outings. In its best stretches Beat Your Ass happily recalls the mixtape schizophrenia of I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, perhaps the most complete document of Yo La Tengo's will to power.
However, just as on Heart, Yo La Tengo's enthusiasm to represent the full range of their interests and influences inevitably leads to dull patches. Electr-O-Pura's sleeve famously listed incorrect track times for all of its longer songs, since Ira Kaplan had observed that writers invariably zeroed in on the band's longest tunes for special criticism. Well, I'm just calling them as I see them, and the very long tunes on I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass are simply not very good. "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" has way too few ideas for an eleven-minute raver. "Daphnia" is an even more interminable rewrite of "Green Arrow." "The Story of Yo La Tango" is placed at the end of the album as almost an admission that no one will ever listen to it all the way through, just like "Night Falls on Hoboken."
In a sense, though, it would be wrong for there to be a Yo La Tengo album that didn't have at least two or three missteps and dead patches. The experimental spirit of the band is such that the focus has always been on what keeps the musicians interested, to hell what the listeners might think. That's the key to both their charm and their longevity. I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass won't win Yo La Tengo many new converts, but for those already aboard the good times keep rolling. If the pattern holds they're due for one more keeper after this one, too.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.