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It’s been nearly a month now since the release of Yeasayer’s sophomore effort Odd Blood. Perhaps expectedly, it’s proven to be a slow-burner to match their debut, All Hour Cymbals. That album was an epic in miniature, its songs barely containing the weight of their own anxiety as they spilled out into the world – ‘2080’s pronouncement that “I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in” a stark mirror held up to the uncertainty of our age. So it was initially a bit of a surprise when they returned earlier this year with the single ‘Ambling Alp’, a wandering slab of pure pop that put such dark and dystopian concerns firmly out of mind for a blissful four minutes.
A few weeks spent with Odd Blood, though, reveal that far from leaving the darkness behind, its traces remain as resonant as ever. While the musical backing has brightened up considerably - echo-drenched eighties production straight from The Lost Boys and anthems that put many of their peers to shame – their lyrical concerns remain as anxious as ever. Album opener ‘The Children’ bubbles with barely resolved tension, and behind the cheery façade of ‘O.N.E.’ lurks a candid admission “No / You don’t move me anymore / And I’m glad that you don’t / ‘Cause I can’t have you anymore”. It seems that, far from projecting their worries outward onto an unsettled world, the band’s core trio – Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton and Anand Wilder, all of whom share songwriting duties - have turned them inwards to create a far more personal set of songs.
“Yeah, I guess that was a reaction to using more impersonal electronic sounds,” says Keating, when we meet before the Bristol leg of their UK tour. “We acknowledged from the beginning that we wanted to take far more influence from electronic and dance music in terms of production techniques. That’s the sort of stuff I grew up with, loving different kinds of hip-hop and electronic music as a teenager.” After several listens, Odd Blood’s subtle undercurrent of crisply programmed beats does begin to make its presence more obviously felt, bubbling just under the surface of ‘Love Me Girl’, and driving ‘Rome’ restlessly forward. “For me it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything different, although it was definitely more about acknowledging those influences. Really keeping an ear open to Just Blaze’s hip-hop tracks or Russ Titelman’s production on Chaka Khan’s songs, listening to them on nice speakers, thinking ‘Wow, listen to what they’re doing with that!’ - and then trying to do that in our own way.”
The result is an album that further refines these nascent elements from All Hour Cymbals, imbuing the band’s songs with a new and welcome directness. Much as a large proportion of the popular press has seen Odd Blood as a seismic shift in direction, the overall impression is less one of revolution than of evolution. Keating agrees. “I think it’s important to keep moving in any direction, as long as you don’t retrace your steps as a musician. It makes sense to keep trying new things, keep expanding, and to try and abandon some of the things we used to do. Maybe [we’ll] revisit them in the future, but for now we need to keep doing new things to stay sharp, and to keep our minds active. So people say it’s a huge departure, but I don’t really hear it as that. I hear it more as a logical step… The first album was more ethereal, a little more cerebral, and this one is more physical.”
In the current musical climate, where new artists are suddenly jumped upon then abandoned as swiftly as they emerge, it’s quite refreshing to hear such unconcern for the ongoing movements of the hype machine. Yeasayer have pulled off the rare trick of managing to avoid the kind of backlash so many bands have been subjected to in the months and years following their emergence. Do they think these trends have affected them as a band? Keating is dismissive. “I don’t really care what they think, or what they say in terms of genre. I don’t think anyone’s ever come up with an accurate description for what we do. We definitely don’t have a description for it, we just do it! I do know that I’d get really bored if I had to make the same sounding album over and over again, it’s not challenging at all. You try to write about different things and you try to use different sounds, but you can only get so far outside of yourself.”
“I see it as whoever can stay in there longest laughs last, in a way,” he continues. “It’s like REM at around the time of their first record. They’re a band I admire a lot, especially their early records. They played about three hundred and thirty shows the year they were touring for Murmur, and they had a certain amount of hype but their attitude was basically ‘We’re not going to go away.’ They kept doing what they wanted to do, and I think that’s important – not getting caught up and thinking you’re a fucking rock star! I’m trying to do this until I can’t walk, basically. This is what I do for a living. You have fun doing it, and it’s a super exciting job – but it’s still a job.”
I wonder whether it would be as easy for a band to build a career like that now, when the internet has increased the speed of this process a hundred fold. “Well, to a certain extent you could look at someone like TV On The Radio. Or Animal Collective – they released eight records before anyone cared. I always thought they were a good marker for uncompromising success - they don’t really give a shit at all, they don’t do TV stuff they don’t want to, they just keep getting on with it. I’m on that. I’m not trying to have some high roller lifestyle!”
Still, on the evidence of Odd Blood’s success this far, and the sold-out crowds they’ve been facing on this tour, he might well end up somewhere near there. Tonight they take the stage to a jam-packed Thekla and a damp crowd undimmed in their enthusiasm after an hour’s queue in the rain. Keating moves jerkily onstage, shifting like a marionette in front of an ever-changing light backdrop. The entire show seems to provide a perfect bridge between the warped psychedelia of their earlier material and the punchy directness of the newer songs, Wilder’s gently yearning vocal on ‘O.N.E’ managing to highlight just how well developed their pop nous is proving to be. Judging by the pace things have moved for them recently, they may have a while to go before they can step back and take stock. In any case, it seems unlikely that the next stage in Yeasayer’s ongoing evolution will prove to be any less fascinating.
