Review: Yeasayer – Odd Blood
By now you must’ve/should’ve heard Yeasayer’s ubiquitious ‘Ambling Alp’ single and/or been to its acid trip of a website. If not, my gosh, get out from under that rock and find it for it is the song to counter all the self-pitying, martyred, wallowing-in-pools-of-their-own-pathetic-misery songs out there – and there are a lot. Speaking with an admirable amount of patient sympathy Chris Keating tells us wisely ‘the world can be an unfair place at times’ and ‘but your lows will have their complement of highs’ before empowering you with the sagest advice of the lot: “if anyone should cheat you, take advantage of, or beat you, raise your head and wear your wounds with pride” – suck it, Radiohead.
Opener ‘The Children’ is possibly the biggest (only?) anomaly on the entire album. You brace yourself for an album laden with similar neo-Daft Punk, Technologicky vocals, but it never arrives. Odd Blood is an album that is so blatantly attractive that it’s nearly a guilty pleasure with its undisguised poppishness. This is an album that has songs you can DANCE to – There are not many non-mainstream bands whose music requires such restraint to keep oneself from flailing one’s limbs. Several are, in fact, of the self-pitying, martyred variant and to dance to someone’s woes is just cruel. And frequently impossible.
‘Madder Red’ has a Spectacularly Oracular opening, if you get my drift (of course you do). Suddenly the fact that Yeasayer’s toured with MGMT doesn’t seem as inconsistent as it initially did, for it appears that one is merely an rockier version of the other. ‘Madder Red’, like ‘Ambling Alp’ before it, is semi-anthemic with its harmonies, its unisonly voices and its incessantly pounding beat.
‘I Remember’ and ‘O.N.E.’ have the same synths that characterise almost all of Memory Tapes’ work. In the case of O.N.E., I can even trace the track on which first I heard them – ‘Graphics’. Now the two releases are way too close for me to make a call re: influence, BUT I must point this out. ‘I Remember’ is worryingly mundane compared to the songs preceding and following it. Meanwhile, ‘O.N.E.’, is a fantastically catchy track reminiscent of some of the most stereotypical R ‘n’ B and pop the 90s had to offer. It’s also got a chorus that to the listener is a blatant untruth – ‘no – you don’t move me anymore’ – what? I can barely type as I struggle to stay rooted to my seat. Must. Dance. MUST! – it even has a Michael Jackson inspired close. There’s more Memory Tapes meets MJ on ‘Love Me Girl’ – more crazily infectious tunes, more uncontrollable chair bouncing that carries on to and through ‘Rome’ before appearing to lose its way and skid off course somewhere around Mondegreen which bases itself entirely upon the opening ‘schwing-schwing’ of ‘Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth’. The breathless ‘everybody’s talking about me and my baybeh’ chorus is catchy, no doubt, but there’s something a bit off about the way the song is pieced together, the way it’s so full of stuff and the way the ending seems unnecessarily drawn out. It stays faithful to the slightly abashed poppiness of the rest of the album yet doesn’t manage to come together quite as seamlessly as the rest of the tracks.
Nonetheless, Odd Blood is a pleasantly promising start to the new year. An honestly, carelessly enjoyable album only slightly dampened by a couple of tracks towards the end. Nothing a replay of Ambling Alp & Co. can’t fix in an eye-blink of an instant.
