New Yo La Tengo, etc.

Here’s our first taste of the upcoming Yo La Tengo record, due out in September, their first proper album in three years. (Title: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. I’m guessing obscure sports reference.)

Dunno what I was expecting but this wasn’t it. And I mean that in a good way. Feedback-leaking rock & roll would have been just fine, or hushed pretty balladry would have been just fine, or jazzy improv would have been just fine. (My fave songs on the past three records have been the ones that most folks seem to consider the Designated Room-Clearers: “Let’s Be Still,” “Night Falls on Hoboken,” “Spec Bebop.”)

But this is something else again. A short & punchy pop song that recalls their earliest records. A pneumatic-but-earthy sound. Thick slices of horn, bouncing piano, all of it thick & chunky but still wafting around like a breeze (it’s, like, a Retaining Wall of Sound). And it never sounds like they’re playacting, as some of the funkier efforts on Summer Sun did.

So anyway, I dig it.

• Yo La Tengo, “Beanbag Chair”

And a propos of nothing Yo La-related, here too are a couple delicious, delirious, trance-inducing round-and-rounds.

• Rev. Louis Overstreet, “In the Morning (Holiness Dance)”
• Antonio Carlos Jobim & Luis Bonfa, “O Nossa Amor”

(Go to Matador Records’ Yo La Tengo page here (that’s where I got the mp3), buy some Rev. Overstreet here, and buy the Black Orpheus soundtrack here.)