Yeasayer - 'All Hour Cymbals' (We Are Free) Released 05/11/07

If the skys burn up tomorrow and solar radiation makes us toast, I'll be indoors listening to Yeasayer one last time. 'All Hour Cymbals' crafts a sonic experimentalism that takes the hypnotic chants and percussion of the traditional societies, and bends, twists, and fuses a musical lexicon with genre-defying categorisation . Yeasayer members comprise four multi-instrumentalists/vocalists/chanters/songwriters - Anand Wilder (guitars), Chris Keating (vocals), Ira Wolf Tuton (fretless bass), Luke Fasano (drums) who reside in Brooklyn, and bring to bear a musical reference libary that could read equal parts of the following - Animal Collective, The Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks, The Beta Band, Arcade Fire, Midlake, Brian Eno & David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac, TV On The Radio, Panda Bear, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young . Yeasayer are musical polyglots that conceal their lyrics in the harmonies and atmospherics to the place where the sound is lord over the song, bridging barbershop harmonies with psychedelic dub-washes and textured soundscapes to conceive a musical treasure chest spilling sapphires, rubies and pearls.

'Sunrise' opens the casket with African tribal drumming and vocal atmospherics amidst an Oriental clime, "...the sky cracked a million ways/ making me blind..." sings Chris Keating with a voice not unlike Gary Numan, and the textured vocal harmonies crafting a song so fresh and vibrant - like an undiscovered fruit, yet reminding of 80's act Icehouse. The musical lexicon expands with the percussive jangle and breadth of instruments on 'Wait For The Summer' - taking in sleigh bells, sitar, hand-claps, with textured vocal harmonies and has such a jaunt as to take a magic carpet ride over continents inconceived with a musical cache that may have the midas touch of Van Dyke Parks alongside Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk'. The African rhythms of '2080' mark for one of the musical highlights of the year with Chris Keatiing's musing and fretting verse - "I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in/ I can't sleep when I about the future I was born into..." - an exoticism revealed in ecstatic Beach Boys harmonies and Michael Brook-like guitar atmospherics that take in the African Plains with its chants and rolling piano striking an anthemic tune, punctuated by "Yeah! Yeah!" chants in the face of any impending apocalypse "...and the sun shines bright on the world tonight..." - making for the last dance when the planet burns to ash.

 'Germs' takes a drenched psych-wash to accordion for a tune coming across like some forgotten Caledonian melody crossed with Balkan/African chants in the multi-ehnic cauldron, singing "...what's hurting me when I breathe/ perhaps it's just the mold on the ceiling..." in a world were the next flu could be the plague, whilst 'No Need To Worry' takes slower sub-Mogwai power-lines (without distortion) that throws the gamut of rock history in there - George Harrison, Beach Boys, Neil Young & Crazy Horse with elements of The Polyphonic Spree/Barbershop quintets. The poly-rhythms continue with the percussive African jazz/blues of 'Forgiveness' with the gait of a gazelle taking hypnotic turns set to C, S, N & Y harmonies.

The Mike Oldfield-like opening synth lines of 'Wait For The Wintertime' disarm with their delicacy before heading for an altogether darker terrain with a gnarly and twisted soundclash that boils bodies and spews bones - a psychedelic and broodily hermetic tune that would have gone down a storm in Apocalypse Now suggesting an altogether darker Yeasayer mind-scape, whilst 'Worms/Waves' has the accessibility of space-dub Beta Band skew-whiffery replete with soothing Harold Budd-like ambient synths. Finishing up with a couple of unnamed tracks featuring a Beta Band-like stripped arrangement and keys to vocal harmonies and a Damon Albarn-sound-alike, followed by The Incredible String Band-esque psychedelic acoustic antics with gorgeous African-styled chants and harmonies that expand into a broad jamboree of celebration and glee "...in Mary's house..." like some church of the saved - "...so many people I deeply care for...".

With an eclecticism unmatched by many contemporary artists, let alone on a debut album, Yeasayer deliver their musical vision on a world braced for catastrophe and ruin, yet embrace the contraries of modern life and the human situation with a whole new musical heritage - compounding the ether of an unseen future with the traditionalism of ritual societies coupled with a sonic breadth that amounts to a whole new world vision for indie music.