Vinyl Diaries III: Yo La Tengo

I'm in a fairly good mood. A little over 12 hours from now, in a leafy park in a hidden laneway in Circular Quay, deep in Sydney's otherwise staid suit-district, Yo La Tengo will take to the stage.

I'll have hopefully warmed up nicely with The Walkmen, Camera Obscura and Peter, Bjorn and John, but it's New Jersey's finest indie squallers who will be on the receiving end of my most schoolboyish eagerness.

In tow will be one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant back catalogues in guitar-rockery of the last 20 years, but, more to the point, a swag of newish material that blisters with more ideas per square inch than the mind can actually compute, in the form of I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.

This welcome return to form was a relief. Previous outing Summer Sun wasn't a disaster as such, it was something possibly even worse... a Yo La Tengo album that provoked little in the way of any kind of reaction at all. In their shambolic, meandering albums all sorts of wrong-turns and miss-cues can be dug out, but they've never before been so ... easy to listen too. But easy to listen to in this case became easy to forget, and though there were a few hints that they still had it in them, the overall picture was of a band that may have grown too comfortable in life to have much left to say.

While nobody was saying as such, I Am Not Afraid was pretty much a make-or-break, with the kind of urgency for which we love Yo La Tengo now popping up in acts such as Arcade Fire - although nobody has really managed to combine it with their deft touch and easy humour as well.

It's this Jekyll and Hyde character that has kept Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew so fresh for umpteen albums, the easy experimentation that can swing from Sonic Youth style guitarnage through Beach Boys harmonies to stuttering Talking Heads style angularity or a drony Velvet Underground dirge in the blink of an eye.

And they don't disappoint. It takes barely eight bars of "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" before faith is restored, a three-note riff dropping a looping groove that a delightfully distorted guitar squall dances all over, flames licking from its fancy shoes. An 11-minute epic delivered with confidence and surety, it's such a welcome return to form you can't help but sigh with relief.

And how do they keep this momentum going? With "Beanbag Chair", a jauntily bright piano and horn caper, then a down turn into the nostalgia-vacation of "I Feel Like Going Home", Georgia's measured tone entwined deliciously with a mournful violin.

"Mr. Tough" is an out-and-out disco-showdown; Ira's pants Bee Gee tight judging by that falsetto - a daft delight. "Black Flowers" passes pleasantly enough, while "The Race Is On Again" hints at what the Flaming Lips might get up to if they ever decide to lighten up on the blotter paper. "The Room Got Heavy" takes a scuzzy turn for the strange, bongo-driven and organ-zapped and unlike anything else they've ever done, which makes it very much Yo La Tengo almost by definition.

Respite is in order and "Sometimes I Don't Get You" obliges, before the instrumental "Daphnia" takes centre stage. A slow-boiling, stately number, it's a pass-the-parcel number where everyone takes off the sticky tape and gently peels back each layer rather than ripping it to shreds. It reflects the soundtrack work they've been increasingly drawn towards and has a strong visual element - twilight forests and summer breeze moondances. The guitar pluck is mesmerisingly metronomic, a ghostly piano line giving the impetus that carries it through. It reaches in and takes advantage of the earlier softening up you've received, gently running a feather up and down your spine.

"I Should Have Known Better" wakes you from your somnambulic reverie via a Ramones or Dead Milkmen style stomper, with "Watch Out For Me Ronnie" harking back to even simpler roll-more-than-rock - Jerry Lee Lewis wouldn't be too ashamed to put his name to it and the busted-microphone production hints that they are not too ashamed for such a link to be drawn.

More of that piano-driven jauntiness returns with "The Weakest Part" which along with the fairly thin "Song For Mahila" could have perhaps hit the cutting room floor, but then what's a Yo La Tengo album without a sprawling sense of saturation with at least a few more ideas than is perhaps healthiest.

"Point And Shoot" brings back the focus and builds the tension up again with a straight up and down indie guitar attack, setting us up perfectly for epic closer "The Story Of Yo La Tengo", as much a summary of their oeuvre as this breath of fresh air of an album. Vibrating slowly into being, it builds incrementally, laying down swirling threads of distorted guitar over a solid rhythm structure. Ira's vocals are buried in this squall, but still manage to find a way through - "we… tried, tried with all our might, we… tore the playhouse down". The voice is subsumed and replaced by guitar following the same melodic imperative. Is it supporting or mocking? It's ambiguous, which is what keeps it from descending into earnestness.

It’s a bold, confident, brutal end to a 77-minute adventure, a masterpiece of unadulterated willingness to throw caution to the wind, revel in music’s ability to melt emotion and intellect together and create something that captures the essence of their sound and extends it perhaps further than it's ever been pushed before. It does what they and almost they alone are capable to do in this well-mined neck of the musical woods – surprise.

Now I have to wait almost all day until they hit the stage…