Despite the apparent indecision in the weather, Yo La Tengo has decided that it is summer. Drawing on bands like salsa great Astrud Gilberto, Nick Drake and a hint of legendary shoe-gazers My Bloody Valentine, Yo La Tengo has created a classic vision of summer.

“Summer Sun” is the album you put on to fall asleep to next to someone. It is an album that couples wish had been playing when they first saw each other across a long, smokey bar. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley bring out the affection of their marriage with the help of odd-man-out James McNew to craft songs that pierce like an arrow into the center of what love can, could and should be.

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Songs like “Season of the Shark,” accented by the click and clack of an abandoned organ’s version of the rumba, is an offer of shelter from the outside world to an unnamed attraction. “Nothing but You and Me” moves along at the speed of hills rolling by in the night as viewed from the open windows of a speeding car.

Not every song, though, is a quiet journey through the solemn summer landscape; drummer Georgia Hubley takes the lead on several songs to move things into explorations in Go-Go music on “Winter A Go-Go” and the Sun Ra variety of jazz on “Georgia Vs. Yo La Tengo.” The album is a contrast between these quiet explorations into laying around on warm summer evenings drinking cold beer and the nights where you just want to go out and bob your head emphatically to a white kid from Jersey’s version of the mambo.

These forays into new musical territory leave the straight-ahead rock songs withering in the summer sun. With a steady progression of fewer rock epics on each album, with “Cherry Chapstick” standing alone on “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out,” “Summer Sun” leaves behind the distortion-ridden guitar riffs for further experimentation with Mingus-style jazz.

Yo La Tengo, after 12 albums and more than a decade of being a band, still defies comparison and cannot be pinned down among its contemporaries. “Summer Sun” proves this as it moves past “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out” and into warmer waters.