This weekend, fully engaged in the travesty that passes as a family function, I experienced a true epiphany that must be shared with you, my devoted reader. My Great-Great Grandma Ilse was there, as always, her breath stinking of stale cigarettes and fruit-flavored Mentos. She decomposed quietly in the rust-colored recliner between the dusty Soloflex and my mother's collection of plastic weenie forks. I stared at her silently, stuffing over-salted hard-boiled eggs into my mouth. Inexplicably, her withered finger arose from the arm of the chair and beckoned me toward her and her odor. Always the dutiful blood relative, I kneeled before her. There arose from her an incredible sound; a combination of hinges screaming and grass scraping together, it was her voice, something nobody remembers ever having heard before.

"Look at these Mentos, you slacker punk!" she spat at me, thrusting the half-eaten pack at me, bits of paper settling on her kaftan-like snowflakes. "You see these Mentos, you good-for-nothing loser?" I replied that I did, but... "No but!" she spat. "You need the truth, and the truth is in these Mentos!" I slowly tried to slip away, but she suddenly grabbed my shoulder in her iron claw, drawing me close enough to see the opaque jelly of a month's dried perspiration between the wrinkles in her cheeks. Her right eyelid fluttered as her left eye pierced me with fixed gaze. I was both petrified and delighted, the possibility of inherited fortune doing battle with the terrible grotesque reality of my ancestrous dinosaur. "All good things come in small packages!" she screeched. "Mentos come in small packages! Mentos are good! All good things come in small packages!" Then she let out a reeking gasp of coffee-scented death, squeezed out a short, trumpeting fart, and slumped back into her chair, asleep.

Which, at long last, brings me to Yo La Tengo's Small Package: Little Honda. I had been waiting for something to come across my desk by these boys, and I haven't been disappointed. Six declared tracks, two bonus tracks, covers all. Yes, covers. Beach Boys, Kinks, Queen, others. Oh Ilse, if you only knew about this small package, your Mentos would surely start to taste like Fruit-Stripe and the green fluid that your toenails secrete would certainly dry up.

It's compact, short and declared as an EP. And it exudes pure fruity chewing satisfaction from start to finish. "Little Honda" is culled from last year's sonic wave of pure bliss, I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, and opens with a peculiar sort of drone, surprisingly energizing rather than enervating. "Be Thankful For What You've Got," so stylin' that Massive Attack covered it on their debut, Blue Lines, is rendered in full relaxation groove as is befitting. Moving deeper, we get renditions of both the Kinks' "No Return" and an off-the-cuff version of "We Are The Champions." Who could ask for more? Ilse would want fruit flavoring, and in a metaphorical sense, she'd get it. All of the tracks have a good-natured quality to them that suggests Yo La Tengo could be the only indie-rock artists out there not suffering from artificial angst and prefabricated pessimism. It's an easy, unassuming, small album that dispels the myth that cover EPs are worthless, corporate record-company fodder suitable only for coasters in your basement. Give it a shot, and tell 'em Ilse sent'cha.

-James P. Wisdom