The centre of the New Jersey trio Yo La Tengo’s 1993 album, Painful, features a blurred polaroid of a plate of French fries. Neil Young’s French fries. Yo La Tengo’s guitarist Ira Kaplan, a moon-faced thirtysomething once described as “the Jewish Jimi Hendrix”, had lunched with the grandfather of grunge in a New York restaurant and asked the waitress to wrap his leftover sandwich. Young’s uneaten fries were accidentally wrapped with it, and were soon back in the apartment Kaplan shares with his wife Georgia Hubley, Yo La Tengo’s drummer, co-vocalist and the daughter of John Hubley, the creator of the cartoon character Mr Magoo. At first they attempted to preserve the historic fries, dating as they did from the week of Young’s acclaimed MTV unplugged performance. “Initially, we refrigerated them but, hey, cooked potatoes have a half-life,” Kaplan explains. “We thought about varnishing, but eventually we decided on photodocumentation.” Lucky. The inherent weirdness of the daughter of the creator of Mr Magoo varnishing Neil Young’s French fries for future generations doesn’t bear contemplation.

Yo La Tengo have just released an excellent ninth album and are touring the UK this month. Their name is Spanish for “I got it” and was the cry of Elio Chacon, a baseball shortstop. But, ironically not everyone seems to “get” Yo La Tengo at all. The name’s Mexican dance-band connotations see them frequently misfiled alongside the Gipsy Kings in record shops and even their press officer admits, “They don’t sound like the Small Faces, and nobody knows what to do with them.” The New York director Hal Hartley’s use of them in film soundtracks, and the fact that they self-mockingly played the Velvet Underground in the film I Shot Andy Warhol, are the closest things the press has ever got to an “angle”.

It’s not surprising. Yo La Tengo’s first two albums slotted neatly into a mid-1980s guitar-pop scene centred around Hoboken’s Watermusic studio, alongside a host of other jangly New Jersey bands, but then the duo made a sudden and shocking shift of gear. “With the President
album in 1989, I remember thinking, Wow!” Kaplan recalls. “We haven’t been playing much since we last recorded, but somehow we’ve got much better.” President buried the sweetest melodies beneath seemingly endless storms of throbbing feedback, while its follow-up, 1990’s Fake Book, a collection of delightful covers of classic acoustic folk-pop songs, couldn’t have been more different.

So is there an element of wilful perversity at work in Yo La Tengo? “Maybe a little,” admits Kaplan, remembering the band’s prestigious support slot two years back in a double-headlining show by indie-rock’s premier-division title holders, Stereolab and Sebadoh, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London. Yo La Tengo’s considered response to facing a theatre full of potential new converts was to ditch all their catchy tunes in favour of a single experimental 45-minute instrumental piece. “Well, we felt that it would be good to do something people remembered, like it or not. We’d prefer it if people liked it, but we’d rather be remembered unfondly than just dimly.” The band’s last five albums have seen them take on a permanent third member, the bassist James McNew, and reconcile the two sides of their personality. I Can Feel the Heart Beating As One, their new album (Matador records), is no exception. Kaplan will always follow his avant-garde rock inclinations, but is still seduced by the kind of simple pop melodies chart acts would die for. With too great a reverence for classic songwriting skills to fit in with drone-rock noodlers such as Labradford or Bardo Pond, the kind of bands Kaplan describes wryly as “dependably unpredictable”, Yo La
Tengo are also, ironically, too experimental to sneak into the public consciousness through the door marked “Classic Guitar Pop”. But even at their most elliptical, they still have the fluid dynamic of a road-tested band .

The title of Spec Bebop, the instrumental centrepiece of the new album, sounds like it’s describing a musical sub-genre of jazz for the visually impaired – perhaps there’s even a Mr Magoo connection – but, predictably, it takes its name from a prewar baseball player. Spec Bebop has the same metronomic, repetitious experimental trademarks as similar pieces by the Anglo-French drone-rockers Stereolab, but somehow it sounds felt , there’s a groove to it, while its European counterpart seems merely thought . “Maybe,” Kaplan concedes politely. “I wonder if we’re not as afraid of being caught jamming as a British band would be. Jamming has very bad connotations for very good reasons, but our goal sometimes is to improvise
something well enough to try and overcome them, I guess there’s something really old fashioned about us.”

Without meaning to, Kaplan has summed up Yo La Tengo, perfectly, futuristic electric rock music played in the old-fashioned way. I got it! Jazz from the jet age.