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“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.”
One such detail that emerged as one of the most memorable moments on the album is the children who drift into earshot on the closing bars of ‘2080’. “When Ira (Wolf Tuton) came up with that part we were like ‘Oh god, that part sounds like its perfect for a group of children to be singing’,” says Wilder before joking, “I dunno if we should say where we got those children from?! We don’t wanna get sued, it was just our voices pitched up!” Fasano adds laughing: “They might want some money or something, it’s just some kids from the east coast,” before joking about the kids from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ and imagining a scenario where the children return as grown ups in twenty years time wanting their royalties.
Obviously Yeasayer are overjoyed by how well the album has been received since its release in October and at the success of their second set of UK dates where they “got a bigger van.” Gigwise can’t imagine how small the previous one must have been as we interview them in the cramped conditions of their latest ride, but for the band their minds are increasingly turning to working on a second record. “Basically that we’re touring a lot I value my time at home so much,” sats Wilder. “When I’m back in New York I’m not going out partying. I’m just trying to get as many ideas onto the computer so that we have as much ready as possible before we start recording.”
Wilder adds that the band don’t expect to spend a similar amount of recording time as on ‘All Hour Cymbals’, in fact they want to get their sophomore effort before the end of next year. “I’d like to get it out by the end of 2008,” he says. “I don’t like this new rule of indie bands that you have to come up with an album every three years, it just seems so lazy to me. I’d like to do one a year because by the time I get to thirty I’m quitting!” “Me too,” jokes Fasano. “Oh Shit!” And what can we expect from the record we ask? “I want the next album to be actually something I want to listen to,” says Wilder before Fasano expands: “If anything for the next album I feel like we need to have more changes and more weird things happening. I feel like our songs are too repetitive, too A-B-A-B-A-B-C or whatever.”
The second album is not the only Yeasayer project in the works however. Wilder reveals: "I was working on a musical before we started Yeasayer which hopefully we'll be releasing as the next Yeasayer project. Sometime this year hopefully. A Yeasayer Presents...project." We can only imagine what that will entail (Something akin The Lion King on acid probably!) and how Yeasayer will top 'All Hour Cymbals', but by the sounds of it they have plenty of ideas for the year 2008. Exciting times.
