YUCK: YUCK
[rating:4.0]
Yuck: Yuck
Label: Fat Possum
Release date: February 15, 2011
Yuck is a predominantly four-piece (sometimes five-piece) outfit made up of members from London, Hiroshima, and New Jersey. On their self-titled Fat Possum debut, the band proudly wears those worldly influences on their sleeves, meshing together a surplus of genetics from other notable artists into one versatile, low-fi production.
Both Yuck the band and Yuck the album could be loosely fit into a number of different genres. There’s indie rock, obviously, but there’s also elements of shoegaze, noise pop, punk, and dream pop all run through the same garage rock aesthetic. All things considered, its not the most original sound that’s ever been broached. In fact, more often than not these songs are derivative of other songs from other prominent bands, beginning with Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo, and Sonic Youth and then extending to Pavement, shoegaze mainstays My Bloody Valentine, and even The Folk Implosion. An entire mile-long scroll could be dedicated to listing all the bands that have a fingerprint on here. So yeah, its a familiar sound. But its a sound that’s tried and true and that they do an impressive job of tackling.
Aside from how recognizable this album is even on a first listen, the thing that immediately jumps out about it is the variation. Perhaps its just a narrow perception, but it seems that as more and more bands influenced by garage rock and indebted to the increasingly popular low-fi production crop up, the differences from track to track grow slimmer. This isn’t the case at all for Yuck. Highlighted by the fantastic, grinding closer “Rubber”, Yuck hardly spends the entirety of the album rocking our ears off, even though the first few notes of the initial track, “Get Away”, suggest that’s what’s to come. Standouts “Holing Out”, “Georgia”, and “Suck” are all infused with thick layers of bass and guitar, but throughout the album these heavier peaks are complemented by valleys of surprisingly comforting harmonies and softer, more wavy instrumentation. “Shook Down” is one such example. Even if they’re borrowing from a recognizable sound, each song manages to distinguish itself in some way so as to prevent it from feeling like 12 iterations of the same old song.
Yuck isn’t going to garner a lot of points for overall creativity, though it certainly begs mentioning that following in the footsteps of other artists doesn’t simply mean playing prearranged songs out of chord books. They should, however, be credited for their execution. Over the course of 12 excellent songs, they’ve done justice to the likenesses of some of the best bands across multiple genres, while simultaneously separating themselves from their more recent contemporaries.
