One of the best jokes you could make about Yo La Tengo is that they inverted the stereotype of the rock critic as failed, frustrated musician: Ira Kaplan started out as a music journalist but couldn’t really express how he felt through it, so he and his wife formed a band instead. But if you really want to know why Yo La Tengo are a “critics’ band,” using this album as the means to try and divine that might lead you to the odd but wholly understandable possibility that they’re actually playing music criticism, at least in the manner of how they question their way through rock history and try to find their own place admist all the music surrounding them. And the more they hear, the more they adapt, so I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One makes it clear that this curiosity will never slow down, that they will always figure out how to translate their rangy, eclectic listening into their own distinct and cohesive sound. (One of the other best jokes you could make about Yo La Tengo is the one the “Sugarcube” video makes, where the cast of Mr. Show attempts to school them in the ways of rock, only for them to get repeatedly distracted because the curriculum seems kind of remedial to them.) The genre nods are a bit far-flung, but they never sound contrived. “Center of Gravity” deceptively starts out with all the signs of a tourist-grade cheapie drum-machine goof on bossa nova, but the bright harmonies of the Ira-Georgia duet reveal that they’re less interested in winking pastiche and more interested in what made Astrud Gilberto sound so affecting. Their now-familiar Nashville studio environs inevitably led to some gorgeous engagement with Al Perkins’ steel guitar, lending the instrumental “Green Arrow” and the introverted  “One PM Again” some proof that their Flying Burrito Brothers fandom wasn’t just namedropping. And their tendency to jam like it’s its own form of outward-facing introspection hits a remarkable high on “Spec Bebop,” a 10:40 motorik lock-groove that oscillates its way into a hypnotic Krautrock fugue and winds up gesturing in the directions of every psych-rock tendency to ever influence or be influenced by the Conny Plank Extended Universe. But it’s not just their influences that’ve expanded: their songwriting, which previously drew a certain amount of power from how they could find countless allusive-yet-evocative ways to express doubt and unease, are more given here to confront the idea that the answers they’re looking for might not be the ones they expected to hear. The fast-and-hooky wall-of-guitar “Sugarcube” is decisively committed to the idea of sacrificing habitual behaviors just to make someone you love happy. The cage-pacing half-tempo “Peter Gunn” surf-funk of “Moby Octopad” envisions a makeout session with a Mets game on TV like a version of “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” where the couple’s already learned to adapt to quiet commitment. And the backbeat-heavy drone of the reflective yet insistent “Autumn Sweater” — the sort of composition that would lend itself well to reimaginings as IDM or post-rock or shoegaze — confronts the threat of a relationship going wrong and struggles with the idea that it’s no longer working, because who else is even out there?

– Nate Patrin