[review 2006: the honourable mentions]

To give you an idea of I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass’s sprawl, consider this: the two tracks that bookend the album represent over twenty minutes of music combined. Remove those tracks and you still have almost an hour of music. I own albums that are half that length. If there was an award for longest rock album of the year, Yo La Tengo would have to be a prime contender.

Yo La Tengo’s twelfth album is not just amazingly long, it’s also amazingly varied; more mix tape than album, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass never comes together as a cohesive, unified work. But perhaps that’s beside the point; eleven-minute noisy jam session bookends aside, there doesn’t appear to be any major attempt to organize the tracks on the album. There are no overarching themes or miniature suites, just a smorgasbord of styles packed against one another like marbles in a kid’s pocket. So let’s forget any attempt to discern the grand statement and look at the songs.

And damn, there are some fantastic songs in here. The best thing about I Will Beat Your Ass’s highlights is that they are representative of the album’s variety; it’s a testament to Yo La Tengo’s versatility that they can play the role of a musical Swiss army knife here. Long-form rockers like opener “Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” serene ballads like “I Feel Like Going Home” and faintly silly pop numbers like “Mr. Tough” work equally well—and that’s just choosing from the first five tracks. It’ll be hard for anyone to come away from the album without picking out one or two favourites; there really seems to be something for everyone. Hell, even the fourteen people who miss the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion get “Watch Out For Me Ronnie,” a rockabilly raveup that sits just this side of believability. Far closer to traditional Yo La Tengo are numbers like “The Weakest Part,” an autumnal, piano-driven bit of dream-pop, and the organ fuzzout of “The Room Got Heavy.”

Taken as a whole, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass can induce fatigue; it’s just too much to take in all at once. As a collection of songs, however, Yo La Tengo have a winner on their hands—lots of definite winners and a genuinely entertaining listen all around, even if you only ever hear it in portions.