Yeah Yeah Yeasayer

“What I want to know is why no one compares us to Ace Of Base?” questions Yeasayer’s Anand Wilder following Gigwise‘s line of questioning about who the band have been likened to. “No one's said that yet and I don‘t understand why because one of our songs sounds exactly like Ace Of Base!” You see, while the music press have been pulling Fleetwood Mac, Peter Gabriel and Thomas Mapfumo, Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire and even Cyndi Lauper out of their all knowing musical encyclopedia’s, the New York quartet have a less auspicious outlook on their eclectic sound - they are a pop band, plain and simple.

“We’re just trying to be a pop band,” explains drummer Kuke Fasano, dismissing any links they have to the world of Prog which they are continually being placed within. “When I think of prog I think of songs you have to listen to five hundred times before you can remember the whole thing. Whereas ours are pretty memorable from the beginning,” continues Fasano. You see this is the beauty of Yeasayer’s debut album ‘All Hour Cymbals’ - the ability to draw on so many influences from many disparate groups of music to make something that sounds so otherworldly to its current peers, while still retaining the capability to make an immediate impact on the listener.

Maybe it's the band’s attitude towards their influences that allows them to do this so astutely. Wilder and Fasano aren’t afraid to admit what they have created borrows heavily from others and it’s quite refreshing to hear a band not trying to say they have created something new. Says Fasano: “Why settle for ripping off one person when you can rip off, like, seven people and put that all into one song, I think that’s much more interesting. You’re going to steal, you will, that’s how music works. If you can steal from as many people as possible at the same time it makes it much more interesting for your audience.” The ‘pop’ line arises again when Wilder jumps into to add: “And keep all those influences with the pretty strict confines of a pop formula.”

Another aspect which makes ‘All Hour Cymbals’ such an astounding body of work is its attention to detail. Despite only being released this autumn, Yeasayer actually started work on it over two years ago and grafted away studiously until earlier this year. “A lot of the sounds on the album are actually from even earlier than when we first started recording in the studio in the fall of 2006,” explains Wilder. “We started doing demos for the first songs on the album in February 2005. We were just very meticulous, going away from it for a couple of days and then coming back and listening to it and deciding that we don’t like that sound, we’ll bring this one in. Even with working on it for months before we were mixing it I spent the entire night before we would go in a mix a song just finishing it off. Just because we were still procrastinating about the last detail.”

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