I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass [CD]

With a title like "I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass," it seems like an understatement to say that veteran indie-rock band Yo La Tengo are feeling confident.

And Yo La Tengo stick to what works after twenty years of indie-rocking, with a Velvet Underground vibe, solid pop tunes, noisy rockers and some wildly engaging jazzy experimentals. They know what they do well, and they do it as well as ever in their tenth album.

They take a bit of a risk in the opening number, "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind," a sprawling eleven-minute track that noodles through jazzy drums and fuzzy guitars. It sounds like the Velvet Underground having a lazy jam session, until the point where the cycling guitars erupt into a giant riff snarl.

The experimentation diddles around through the rest of the album, but never so strongly as it does in "Pass the Hatchet." They dabble in various other kinds of pop music, sprinkled with country, blippy electropop, retro-sixties, freestyle jazz and sweeping, dreamier numbers, like the ones from their last original album.

The highlight is "Beanbag Chair," which is one of those instantly lovable pop songs -- jaunty piano, blasts of horn, mischievous lyrics, and daydreaming vocals. If you ever heard Yo La Tengo on the radio, this would be their big, big single.

Yo La Tengo have diddled around with all kinds of sounds for the past two decades, usually with lots of success. Just so long as they don't try freestyle harmonica or classical bagpipes, there's no reason to think that they won't continue to succeed at their experimentation.

But they give their music some fresh new twists this time around -- they include silky string arrangements by David Mansfield, lots more piano, and more horns than they were using in "Summer Sun," courtesy of drummer Georgia Hubley. It feels peppy, fun and energized, like these guys were enjoying themselves just making every song.

Frontman Ira Kaplan shows his range in these songs, crooning "You can never sleep enough/and your alarm is going off/you wake up and you can't pretend/the dream is just a dream again," in a smooth voice. He's joined by bassist James McNew's falsetto in "Mr. Tough," which is a bit of a shock for awhile, but which works out all right.

Yo La Tengo are not afraid of you, but you don't need to be afraid of their latest effort either -- "We Are Not Afraid of you and We Will Beat Your Ass" is an all-around solid little album. Nice work!

If you already know YLT then it is really easy to review this album for you. Suffice to say it most closely resembles a Best Of.. collection. Not in quality (it has a few weak moments) but in style. 'I Am Not Afraid...' basically covers most of the musical variety of all their previous work, plus a few things that they've not got around to yet.

It starts and closes with extended art-rock wigouts, the opener chugging along in rather noodly fashion before really lashing along at the close. In between we get gentle piano-led beauty, fuzzy grunge, psychedelic blues, a long atmospheric instrumental and a big fat juicy collection of YLT having an extremely good time. You won't like every minute of it, and as on almost every YLT album sometimes you'll skip different bits but then that was always the point of YLT for me, if you are not in the mood then something different is just around the corner.

'I am Not Afraid..' is the sound of a band bursting with ideas and energy and perfectly happy to get the whole lot on record with considerable craft. You suspect that there is plenty more to come too.

This is my first taste of Yo La Tengo. After it kept appearing on my music recommendations list from Amazon I decided to take the plunge. I've been stung before this way (Mercury Rev - which I absolutely hated) but I thought why not, £6.97 is barely more than a packet of fags and it can't possibly be any worse than Mercury Rev. I have to say I'm impressed and I wish I'd listened to this band before.

What we have on "I'm Not Afraid Of You And I'll Beat Your Ass" is an extremely eclectic mix of music varying form soul to good rock numbers through varying degrees of jazziness and indieness. The album opens and closes with two long tracks, the excellent 'Pass the hatchet I think I'm longkind' and the equally as good 'Story of Yo La Tengo'. Both in their near-shoegazing ways remind me of the excellent and almost completely overlooked "Amusement Parks on Fire". Between these two thick slices lies a sandwich filling of infinite variety most of which works excellently.

Highlights of the filling include the slow-paced downer of "I feel like going home" sung by Ira Kaplan, the McCartneyesque "Black Flowers", the Byrds-like "The race is on again" and the Velvet Underground inspired "I should have known better". Then again virtually all of the tracks are good here. The one duff track in my opinion is Mr Tough. It just sounds...well to be honest this could be The Scissor Sisters as my daughter helpfully pointed out - and she was right. This is a really dislikeable track. But....saying that the quality of rest of the album more than makes up for this one blemish.

I've listened to this quite a lot now and I think its growing on me. I didn't include it in my top 10 albums of 2006 but I'd say it's touch and go - this could easily make it sometime.

Give this a go, especially if you haven't come across this band before. you'll be pleasantly surprised like me. Something for everyone.