Pitchfork

"I Am Not Afraid of You, and I Will Beat Your Ass."

Uh, really?

"Yep."

Seriously?

"Yeah. Seriously."

Wow. Can you explain the title?

"I don't think it needs any explanation."

Ok then! While we're still not sure if he's joking about that or not, McNew assured Pitchfork in an interview yesterday that the new Yo La Tengo album does in fact exist, and it's coming out on Matador on September 12. "It's ridiculous how close to finished it is," McNew said. "We're mastering it tomorrow, and the artwork is being put together." The album contains 15 original songs, including "Black Flowers", "Pass the Hatchet", and "The Story of Yo La Tango". Yes, "Tango", not "Tengo". Sorry, fact checkers.

"I'm not sure whether we'll have to put, like, '(sic)' after it when we print it on the record or not," McNew said. "It's almost like a torturous 'Mr. Show' joke, because you'll just have to keep explaining to people that no, it's not actually a typo, even though it is a typo, and then somebody will just wind up crying."

McNew didn't have much to say about the sound of the record, other than that the songs are "by our standards, short and upbeat." The disc was recorded in Nashville with longtime YLT producer Roger Moutenot, and features contributions from local Nashville horn players as well as string arrangements by David Mansfield.

"It takes us a long time between records, and I think we're hard to please," McNew said. "The next thing that we do has to be sufficiently different than the thing that we just finished, so I think it took a long time to get to that...but it passed the test."

Yo La Tengo's last brand new studio album came out in 2003, but it's not like they've spent the last three years sitting on the couch watching Mets games on TiVo over and over again. There was the Today Is the Day EP, that mammoth collection Prisoners of Love: A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent Songs, 1985-2003, those Hanukkah shows, those WFMU covers sessions (recently compiled on Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics), some stuff I'm probably forgetting about, and, last but not least, quite a bit of film soundtrack work.

Following up on the scores to the acclaimed recent films Junebug, Old Joy, and Game 6, the band also made music for the forthcoming movie Shortbus, directed by Hedwig and the Angry Inch's John Cameron Mitchell. It will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

As previously reported, Yo La Tengo will appear on the season finale of "Gilmore Girls" on May 9, alongside Sonic Youth, Joe Pernice, and Sparks. "We taped it about two weeks ago," McNew said. "It was amazing. It was really fun. I had a ball. It was totally wild. The line between fantasy and reality took a savage beating that day. I sort of stepped into the television-- it was the weirdest thing."

But hanging out with Rory and Lorelai wasn't the most exciting part about the shoot for McNew. "I got to meet [Sparks'] Ron Mael! I was very excited about that. We mostly just talked about sneakers. He's a rabid sneaker collector, apparently, so we had stuff to talk about."

Chances for the public to chat about Nikes with McNew are fairly slim this summer, as the band has only a smattering of live shows scheduled. (One, of course, is at our own Pitchfork Music Festival, where they'll play alongside Os Mutantes, Spoon, Devendra Banhart, Mission of Burma, Aesop Rock, the National, Jens Lekman, Tapes 'n Tapes, Chin Up Chin Up, Diplo, Tarantula A.D., Tyondai Braxton, Bondo Do Role, and more to be announced.) A full tour is in the works for fall.

They are not afraid, and they will beat your ass:

05-29 Rome, Italy - Circolo Delgi Artisti
05-30 Bologna, Italy - Estragon
06-01 Barcelona, Spain - Parc del Fòrum (Primavera Sound Festival) *
07-13 Brooklyn, NY - Prospect Park (Celebrate Brooklyn!)
07-30 Chicago, IL - Union Park (Pitchfork Music Festival) #
08-13 Saratoga, CA - Montalvo Center for the Arts (Bleeding Edge Festival) $

* with 2 Many DJ's, Castanets, Babyshambles, the Drones, Motorhead, Ferenc, Why? No-Neck Blues Band, more
# with Os Mutantes, Spoon, Devendra Banhart, Mission of Burma, Aesop Rock, the National, Jens Lekman, Tapes 'n Tapes, Chin Up Chin Up, Diplo, Tarantula A.D., Tyondai Braxton, Bondo Do Role, more TBA
$ with Matmos and Zeena Parkins, Isis and Tim Hecker, Brightblack Morning Light, the Avett Brothers, Sunroof!, more

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