Yeasayer | ||
| Allmusic Biography : The music of Brooklyns Yeasayer is an eclectic, genre-bending journey into pop, rock, Middle Eastern and African musics, folk, and dub. Encouraging listeners to don their thinking caps and dancing shoes, the groups full-length debut, All Hour Cymbals, arrived in 2007. Synthetic sounds and dance-inspired production played a larger role on 2010s Odd Blood, which marked Yeasayers debut on the Billboard 200. Still quirky and animated, they presented a more streamlined sound on their fifth studio album, 2019s Erotic Reruns. Vocalist/keyboardist Chris Keating and vocalist/guitarist Anand Wilder were both raised in Baltimore, where they honed their vocal skills in a barbershop quartet and played in a high school band, Sic Transit, before leaving town to attend different colleges. Years later, the two relocated to New York and began shaping the project that would soon become Yeasayer. Wilders cousin, Ira Wolf Tuton, joined as the groups bassist, and drummer Luke Fasano was the last member to come aboard in May 2006. The band set to work on recording its debut album, All Hour Cymbals, which was unveiled in October 2007 and met with acclaim from critics and buzz in the blogosphere. International tour dates and festival appearances followed, during which the band honed its blend of live instrumentation and pre-recorded samples. When it came time to record a second album, Yeasayer traveled to Woodstock, New York and rented the country home of percussionist Jerry Marotta. With guests including Marotta, who took over for Fasano on drums, the resulting Odd Blood appeared in early 2010 and proved even more successful than its predecessor in terms of album sales, peaking at number 63 on the Billboard 200. In the fall of 2011, work began on the groups third album, Fragrant World. A continuation of the murkier textures of Odd Blood, the album arrived in the summer of 2012 and featured guest appearances from string player Kishi Bashi and NOMOs Elliot Bergman. It reached the Top 50 of the U.S. album chart. The live album Good Evening Washington D.C., Live at 9.30 Club followed late in 2013. The band resurfaced early in 2016 with singles from its fourth long-player, Amen & Goodbye, released that April via Mute Records. Still offering offbeat sound explorations, core members Keating, Wilder, and Tuton were joined on the album by guests including Suzzy Roche of the Roches and guitarist Steve Marion (aka Delicate Steve). It also featured production help from Joey Waronker of Atoms for Peace. Written and produced by its core trio, Yeasayers next album, the sleeker Erotic Reruns, was inspired in part by post-presidential election fallout. It arrived on Yeasayer Records in 2019. | ||
 | Album: 1 of 7 Title: All Hour Cymbals Released: 2007-10-23 Tracks: 11 Duration: 46:59 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Allmusic AlbumCover | 1 Sunrise (04:06) 2 Wait for the Summer (04:53) 3 2080 (05:23) 4 Germs (03:12) 5 Ah, Weir (01:21) 6 No Need to Worry (05:26) 7 Forgiveness (03:40) 8 Wait for the Wintertime (04:52) 9 Worms (04:07) 10 Waves (04:56) 11 Red Cave (04:58) |
| All Hour Cymbals : Allmusic album Review : With its mixture of world music rhythms, western pop structures, and ethnic weirdness, Yeasayers debut finds a home somewhere between the trendy bars of Brooklyn and the villages of developing countries. On paper, the album looks like an all-out mess, a jumbled pile of sitars, synths, bongos, sequencers, fretless bass, choir harmonies, and whatever else Yeasayer deems necessary to conjure up the globetrotting images that fuel these 11 tracks. But All Hour Cymbals rarely strains under its own weight, even when it mixes Beach Boys harmonies with minimalist art rock ("No Need to Worry") or steel drums with sludgy, Sabbath-styled metal ("Wait for the Wintertime"). New York City has hosted its share of experimental bands in the early 21st century, from TV on the Radio to Animal Collective to the otherworldly experiments of Grizzly Bear. Still, Yeasayers appeal is not that theyre otherworldly, but are instead entirely grounded in this world. Rarely does a debut album sound so geographic, so well-traveled -- even if the journey through All Hour Cymbals feels slightly odd, as if the bandmates constructed some Paleozoic musical map in their heads where the landmasses of Africa and America had been pushed together, blending the disparate traditions and instruments from both continents. Sequencers figure prominently in some songs, but theyre trumped by the clannish, tribal sounds that bring Yeasayer back to earth: the polyphonic percussion, the chant-like melodies, the Middle Eastern influences. Throughout it all, the band remains rooted in pop music, and songs like "2080" (which was tossed around the Internet in early 2007, bouncing from blog to blog in a game of hipster hot-potato) have instantly memorable hooks and gorgeous, airy harmonies. The real treat is when those styles collide -- the western and the Middle Eastern, the urban and the native -- as they do on "Wait for the Summer," where guitarist/vocalist Anand Wilder echoes the anticipation of many an American grade-schooler ("Wait for summer, well sleep when we wanna") over a bed of sitars and vaguely foreign scales. Who cares if its often hard to hear what Wilder is saying? His melodies are mumbled, harmonized, repeated, and hidden under piles of instruments, so they may as well be delivered in some indigenous language by the time all is said and done. "Wait for the Summer" consequently comes across as ritualistic, something with which to praise the sun or awaken the rain gods, but it also serves as a bizarre "Schools out!" anthem for the indie crowd. Could Yeasayer be indie rocks answer to the absence of adventurous worldbeat figures like David Byrne and Peter Gabriel? Its too early to tell, but All Hour Cymbals is a mature, cohesive, and highly recommended debut. | ||
 | Album: 2 of 7 Title: Live at Ancienne Belgique Released: 2010 Tracks: 13 Duration: 1:09:22 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify AlbumCover | 1 Madder Red (04:53) 2 Rome (04:06) 3 Wait for the Summer (05:35) 4 Tightrope (04:34) 5 Red Cave (04:18) 6 Grizelda (04:16) 7 Sunrise (05:30) 8 Mondegreen (05:18) 9 Strange Reunions (05:42) 10 O.N.E. (07:41) 11 Ambling Alp (06:20) 12 The Children (04:48) 13 2080 (06:21) |
 | Album: 3 of 7 Title: Odd Blood Released: 2010-02-08 Tracks: 10 Duration: 39:54 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Allmusic Wikipedia AlbumCover | 1 The Children (03:14) 2 Ambling Alp (03:57) 3 Madder Red (04:05) 4 I Remember (04:25) 5 O.N.E. (05:25) 6 Love Me Girl (05:02) 7 Rome (03:50) 8 Strange Reunions (02:37) 9 Mondegreen (04:39) 10 Grizelda (02:40) |
| Odd Blood : Allmusic album Review : Don’t judge a book by its cover… or an album by its first track. Odd Blood gets off to an odd start with “The Children” -- a robotic, plodding song that prizes mood over melody -- before settling into a more balanced groove, mixing the multicultural sounds of Yeasayers debut with a new emphasis on electronica, global trip-hop, and digital production. Like All Hour Cymbals, this is a thinking man’s album, one that requires its listeners to put on their thinking caps as well as their dancing shoes. It’s more urban than its predecessor, though, with most songs ditching the tribal harmonies and lo-fi analog ambience of the band’s earlier work in favor of an electric, textured sound. “Love Me Girl,” with its mix of Balearic beat keyboards and sampled female vocals, could have come from an Ibiza nightclub, while “Madder Red” strikes an unlikely balance between synth pop, Middle Eastern folk, and ‘80s dance music. Anand Wilder often abandons his guitar entirely, focusing instead on the keyboards that serve as Odd Blood’s bedrock, and he sings the latter song in a voice that’s clear, pleasant, and devoid of the yelping that characterized some of All Hour Cymbals’ tracks. Chris Keating has similarly improved, so much so that he delivers a rather stunning ballad -- the Air-influenced “I Remember” -- with warmth and understated confidence. Odd Blood’s emphasis on genre-mashing can overwhelm the weaker tunes, whose melodies are sometimes less interesting than the arrangements themselves, but the album has enough highlights to outweigh any filler on side B. All in all, this is a rare sophomore album that widens the bands sound without narrowing its appeal. | ||
 | Album: 4 of 7 Title: Fragrant World Released: 2012-08-14 Tracks: 11 Duration: 48:31 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Allmusic AlbumCover | 1 Fingers Never Bleed (04:30) 2 Longevity (03:10) 3 Blue Paper (05:07) 4 Henrietta (04:40) 5 Devil and the Deed (03:36) 1 No Bones (03:09) 2 Reagan’s Skeleton (05:05) 3 Demon Road (04:12) 4 Damaged Goods (04:58) 5 Folk Hero Shtick (04:39) 6 Glass of the Microscope (05:25) |
| Fragrant World : Allmusic album Review : Brooklyns Yeasayers evolution has always been based on a near-constant juggling of disparate sounds; the sound combinations have just been different from album to album. While 2007s All Hour Cymbals melded the watery drugged-out ethno-pop of Animal Collective or MGMT with muscular classic rock tendencies, 2010s follow-up, Odd Blood, traded yelpy vocals for a more front-and-center approach and attempted to merge brittle electronica with bigger-budget pop production. Fragrant World, the bands third full-length, follows this ever-changing pattern, leaning on R&B-informed; beats, bleating synth tones, and Chris Keatings pleadingly romantic vocals. The result is the most pop-friendly and dance-oriented Yeasayer material to date, coming off like some futuristic Top 40 pop where the sonic hooks were used to are insidiously replaced by strange alien sounds and off-kilter (if still bangin) club rhythms. Like their peers Dirty Projectors, Yeasayer have embraced the influence of smoothed-out 90s R&B; and sought to meld it with vaguely Eastern sounds. Songs like "Longevity" see this slick blue-eyed R&B; colliding with moody live strings and heavily processed samples. "Henrietta" mashes uneasy synth tones with hooks sounding like a more demented dub mix of a forgotten Duran Duran B-side. The bands experimentation is running at a controlled high, and at its best the band pushes the pop form to unfathomable limits without completely losing the plot or disintegrating into self-indulgent hodgepodge. Songs like the bombastic "Reagans Skeleton" recall the cold precision of LCD Soundsystem or Daft Punk and "Devil and the Deed"s glitchy production is frenetic as it is catchy. Fragrant World is a hallucinatory take on dance music, and the band employs a rainbow of textures and production techniques so dense that much of the nuance of the songs is easy to miss on the first two or three go-rounds. By the time "Folk Hero Shtick" rolls around near the albums close, the songs skittering from Pink Floyd-ish melodies and fingerpicked acoustic guitar breakdowns to electronic bass swells and found-sound synth tones is nothing short of head-spinning. While Yeasayer manage to avoid sounding over-produced or purposefully obtuse, the sheer volume of seemingly mismatched elements they throw out creates a thick veneer and demands the listener keep up with the walls of vocodered vocals, subtle electronic flourishes, and warped takes on mainstream pop production. For those willing to rise to the challenge, Fragrant World has a wealth of obscured moments of bizarre genius. They dont hand them over willingly, but with a little digging, incredibly interesting ideas are just below the surface. | ||
 | Album: 5 of 7 Title: Good Evening Washington D.C.: Live at 9:30 Club Released: 2013-11-12 Tracks: 15 Duration: 1:14:02 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify AlbumCover | 1 Good Evening D.C. (01:12) 2 Fingers Never Bleed (05:19) 3 Henrietta (06:49) 4 2080 (05:38) 5 Longevity (04:59) 6 O.N.E. (06:04) 7 Reagan’s Skeleton (04:43) 8 Madder Red (04:15) 9 Demon Road (05:02) 10 Wait for the Summer (04:28) 11 Ambling Alp (04:42) 12 Blue Paper (06:07) 13 Tightrope (03:44) 14 Devil and the Deed (04:47) 15 Folk Hero Shtick (06:07) |
 | Album: 6 of 7 Title: Amen & Goodbye Released: 2016-04-01 Tracks: 13 Duration: 39:26 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Allmusic AlbumCover | 1 Daughters of Cain (01:53) 2 I Am Chemistry (05:01) 3 Silly Me (03:22) 4 Half Asleep (04:17) 5 Dead Sea Scrolls (03:25) 6 Prophecy Gun (03:59) 7 Computer Canticle 1 (00:28) 8 Divine Simulacrum (02:55) 9 Child Prodigy (00:59) 10 Gersons Whistle (05:06) 11 Uma (03:13) 12 Cold Night (04:13) 13 Amen & Goodbye (00:35) |
| Amen & Goodbye : Allmusic album Review : Always challenging themselves and their listeners with a shifting musical paella of contrasting timbres and style influences, Yeasayer were joined by drummer Joey Waronker of Atoms for Peace in a production role during the late stages of their fourth studio album, Amen & Goodbye. In keeping with the bricolage aspect, the recording also features performances from a diverse selection of guests, including folk singer Suzzy Roche and guitar virtuoso Steve Marion aka Delicate Steve (both appear on "Gersons Whistle"). What proves to be a trademark of the album is introduced in a prologue-type track, the nearly two-minute "Daughters of Cain." Razor-sharp vocal harmonies reminiscent of "Bohemian Rhapsody" settle in for appearances throughout, and also set the stage for an out-of-time convergence of the past and -- via outer spacy, mechanical synth textures -- the future. The sprawling "I Am Chemistry" offers an album snapshot, incorporating sunny harmonies, as well as 80s keyboard tones, 2010s otherworldly effects, acoustic instrumentation, a childrens choir, and the timeless noise of hammering. Compared to prior LPs, there are fewer hints of R&B; and more of John Lennon on Amen & Goodbye. World rhythms and scales are also woven into the design, as is customary for the band, such as the Middle Eastern influence apparent on "Half Asleep." Most of the tunes are discernible and dancy, such as on the new wavy "Dead Sea Scrolls" and catchy "Cold Night," though Yeasayer makes room for songs like the elegant, more explorative "Prophecy Gun;" the Beatlesque, Theremin-graced ballad "Uma;" and the trippy and percussive "Divine Simulacrum." Typical of the album and how it plays with expectations, the half-minute "Computer Canticle I" features whirring synths but also earthy, acoustic drums, at once evoking tribal plains and space sirens. This combining of the human-organic and the quirky-mechanical not only rewards repeat listens, but ultimately fascinates with warm alienation. | ||
 | Album: 7 of 7 Title: Erotic Reruns Released: 2019-06-07 Tracks: 9 Duration: 29:05 Scroll: Up Down Top Bottom 25% 50% 75% Spotify Allmusic AlbumCover | 1 People I Loved (02:45) 2 Ecstatic Baby (02:54) 3 Crack a Smile (03:51) 4 Blue Skies Dandelions (03:04) 5 Let Me Listen in on You (03:52) 6 Ill Kiss You Tonight (03:02) 7 24-Hour Hateful Live! (02:51) 8 Ohm Death (02:54) 9 Fluttering in the Floodlights (03:52) |