YEASAYER: ODD BLOOD
[rating:5]
Yeasayer: Odd Blood
Label: Secretly Canadian
Release Date: February 9, 2010
It’s a good thing Yeasayer is mostly full of shit. In the run up to the release of its second album, the Brooklyn band claimed it was partially inspired by the theory of Singularity, which hypothesizes that artificial intelligence will eventually overtake that of the human mind. If that were actually true, and the group had gone ahead and constructed a concept album about man versus machine, Odd Blood wouldn’t be the florescent joy that it is. It certainly starts out hinting at some larger idea which might possibly involve revolting computers: opener “The Children” features garbled vocals and a clanging, industrial stomp, and is easily the worst song of the ten. But by the end of the record, frontman Chris Keating is singing about he and his girl “making love ’til the morning light” over a clattering clap-along chorus, and the experience as a whole is less a pseudo-scientific think-piece than it is the soundtrack to the romantic sci-fi drama John Hughes never got to make…on acid.
A lot easier to believe is the group’s assertion that it wants to compete with the likes of Rihanna for space on the world’s dance floors. As Animal Collective did with last year’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, on Odd Blood Yeasayer puts aside its art-pop pretensions in favor of making art that simply pops. 2007’s All Hour Cymbals thought being psychedelic meant not having to write real songs, and sometimes it does, but the flashes of melody and atmospheric inventiveness on their debut only made you hope the trio would eventually hang its mishmash of ideas on something sturdier. And now it has—namely, the drums of a dude who used to backup Peter Gabriel. And a shitload of synths, too.
So yeah, this is a “New New Wave” (or, sigh, “nu-wave”) record. Those aforementioned drums—particularly on the sublimely airy highlight “Madder Red”—are the same kind of huge, echoey cloudbursts that made wimps like Simple Minds and Human League seem muscular. Anand Wilder’s guitar appears only in snippets, often buried under a stack of glittering keyboards. And the slow-drifting closer “Grizelda” is about ruthless Colombian drug kingpin Griselda Blanco, whose exports kept American clubs up all night back in the ’80s. But Odd Blood is not a work of empty nostalgia. It is, in fact, very much an album of the late-aughties, when the accessibility of music has saturated young artists with so many sounds it’s impossible not to just feed them all through the pop kaleidoscope. And, despite appearances, it is still very much a Yeasayer album. The band hasn’t ditched the worldly influences of All Hour Cymbals—they’ve been absorbed into rhythms. First single “Ambling Alp,” a jittery earwig named after 1930s boxer Primo Carnera (between this and “Lisztomania,” Phoenix’s hyper-infectious ode to 19th century composer Franz Liszt, the key to a hit single appears to be clicking the Random Article function on Wikipedia and writing about the first historical figure that comes up), has a reggae lilt beneath the glowing electro production. “O.N.E.” bounces along on a rubbery disco beat that’s straight out of carnivale. And there are traces of dub and Middle Eastern folk sprinkled throughout. Everything is coated in a unifying Technicolor sheen, showing the group has learned that psychedelia can be trippy and groovy at the same time, man.
As for a theme? Well, that’s easy: love. Not a cloying, disingenuous love either. “I Remember,” a ballad about Keating’s wife built around a fluttering keyboard line, is the most full-hearted, with references to “making out on an airplane,” “golden hearts in a fresh cut grass” and “being stupid together.” It’s warm and sentimental without being saccharine. And it’s also the greatest counterargument to that Singularity nonsense: Computers might one day be able to think like us, but they’ll never be able to feel like we do.
-Matthew Singer
