Tracks

“Ask the Elephant”
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band

Done laughing? Good. Rock’s all-time-biggest punching bag and punch line continues to push buttons at age 76. Her reputation as a Beatles ruiner and shrill oddball are so entrenched, there’s little point now to argue that old records like Fly and Approximately Infinite Universe are chic, influential fun.

For her new incarnation, Ono’s enlisted son Sean Lennon, Japanese pop tinkerer Cornelius and Yuka Honda as her backing Plastics (i.e., the people actually making the music here). The results are not too far from Honda’s adorably eccentric Ciba Matto. Flute and guitar lightly do their own weird thing as a thick, rubbery bass line holds the rudimentary groove. Play-dumb kiddie-music lyrics (“Ask the window. 1-2-3-4 I’m so quick / Whooo!”) imply Ono might pay attention to her disciples in Deerhoof.

It’s simple, lightly weird and innocent, like everything she’s done in hindsight, so what’s the fuss? Ask yourself what’s more embarrassing to Lennon’s legacy: this or a freaking video game and Vegas circus based on the Beatles?

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“Periodically Triple or Double”
Yo La Tengo

Though best known for casual, cute guitar blasts, Yo La Tengo can get funky. In the past the Jersey trio covered Sun Ra, while the last album saw Ira Kaplan hitting falsetto notes on “Mr. Tough.” The Hoboken indie heroes are such veteran record geeks, any sound of urban cool from the past seems fair game for a YLT single. But some styles do not suit the group. And this talky, organ-driven, frat-rock bop wears like a poodle skirt with a tweed professor’s blazer.

“Never read Proust,” Kaplan opens, when you know he totally has. A walking blues rhythm snaps along underneath like Booker T. & the MGs playing “Wooly Bully” at half speed. The secret to those old party sounds was either nonsense lyrics or no lyrics at all. The spiel here is just far too brainy. Where a “whomp bomp a loo bomp” would suffice, we get a David Sedaris essay read with one raised eyebrow. YLT works great as a clean Velvet Underground for cruciverbalists and lovebirds. This is, how would they say, malapropos.

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