Ace Oddity

Yeasayer
Words: JJ Dunning

“What does that mean?” Yeasayer frontman Chris Keating is leaning on the edge of his seat, eyeing The Fly with plain-faced suspicion. There is an awkward lull as we re-cross our legs and chomp down a bit harder on the end of our biro. Somewhere a clock is ticking. “What’s the definition of pop?” he asks again. There is a long pause. No, sorry Chris, we don’t know, comes the uncertain mumbling from our mouth. Panickedly, we explain that we think that – compared to their last – his band’s new album is much more of a pop venture. Put another way, it’s not as much of a prog record like the last one, is it? There’s a pause, before a voice to our left pipes up. “What’s prog?” asks bassist Ira Tuton, grinning broadly. Oh for fuck’s sake. The interview’s only been going for five minutes and already we’re getting bogged down in irrelevances. “I think pop means louder vocals. Clarity,” says guitarist Anand, displaying a slightly lax attitude to question answering. “Pop is also danceable,” adds Ira. “That’s true, but there’s tons of dance music which you wouldn’t say is pop,” says Chris. “Yeah, but if you throw on a hook, loud vocals on top of dance music and there’s not a lot of difference,” adds Ira again. The band look at each other as we try not to look confused. Eventually, Chris speaks. “It’s poppier, I agree.” Again, he leans in. “But I don’t know what that means.” As bewildering cyclical conversations with Yeasayer go, that’s a pretty good introduction. Sitting around a coffee table in Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village, our ‘interview’ is peppered with bizarre tangents, crackpot religious theories and hugely entertaining bouts of irrelevance. Chris, Anand and Ira are an extreme opposite of the po-faced acid casualties we were expecting, and much closer to the effervescence of their music. Which is saying something, because ‘Odd Blood’ is a rambunctious, undulating pop masterpiece; a lolloping popzilla that veers from Broadway grandure to abstract whirring and buzzing in a swish of its technicolour tail. It certainly belongs here in New York, the band’s adopted home; because it must have stuck out like a neon skyscraper in the bleak ‘burbs of Baltimore. As anyone who’s ever seen The Wire will tell you, that ain’t a place for synth-tastic space-pop ballads that are camp as a savannahfull of chiffon marquees. For Chris, certainly, growing up an artist in a slate grey city seemed to take its toll. “At school, I got beaten up every day,” he says matter of factly. “We went to a small school where there weren’t really any jocks. There were sports guys, but they weren’t like sports guys. They weren’t scary and really mean, they actually all took up acting. They were in the school plays because they thought that that was the way to get girls. The biggest sports jock was in Hamlet. It was weird, kind of upside down.” Also lurking incongruously amongst the strangely-cerebral meatheads was Alex Scally, now one half of lush dreamsters Beach House, who, at the time, was the ringleader of a reggae band that included Anand on bass. Most weirdly, in the Baltimore fraternity of the era, this still made him “cool”. Equally, delving into the music of the band’s childhood is key to deciphering why their concept of cool is without boundary – and how they’ve managed to make an album that transcends genre without being so pretentious that it’d make Brian Sewell look like an aitch-dropping soot-faced everyman. “Any music that you hear when you are a little kid is just engraved on your brain in a different way,” says Anand. “It stays with you forever.”
“Y’know, music of all kinds is just so exciting,” agrees Chris. “We were talking today about the first time – that era when you’re twelve or eleven – when you first buy your first tape. I’ve probably listened to those tapes more than I’ve ever listened to anything. Stone Temple Pilots and Beck, Public Enemy – I was listening to those non-stop. Even Salt-N-Pepa; their tape wore out to the point where it was like ‘LLllettttssstallkkaboutsexxxbBBaybee’.” To think that a broken Salt-N-Pepa tape could, at least in part, be responsible for the best new album of the year is reassuringly mind-bending; in fact, listening to the slovenly, fucked-up vocals of ‘Odd Blood’ opener ‘The Children’ it even makes sense. What do they think of their hometown nowadays? “Everyone in Baltimore thinks that they’re much more supportive of music than anyone in New York would be,” says Chris, “but in reality I think it’s the opposite. I feel like New York is super supportive because everyone comes from different places and they’re just kind of excited – I mean there are obviously people who’ve grown up in New York, but a lot of musicians are from all over. Baltimore’s very cliquey.” Today, living in Brooklyn, it seems that Chris and Anand, plus Philadelphian Ira, have brought their flamboyance to the right place. For instance, fellow Baltimore refugees Animal Collective also reside within the sundial shadow of the Empire State, and share their ability to craft serenely surreal soundscapes, whilst the Dave Longstreth-helmed Dirty Projectors are peers in the crikey-this-shouldn’t-work-but-itreally- does-doesn’t-it? stakes. “I think that being in New York is hugely important,” says Anand. “It’s about being exposed to so many things. I mean, tonight I am going to see a Kate Bush dance troupe. People imitating Kate Bush’s dancing from different music videos. You can go to a different show every single night and be inspired – like, “Hey, that’s a new interesting sound!”, or, “Maybe we should do something like this?” – I don’t know if we’re necessarily inspired by the sound of the brakes on the subway or anything like that, but it’s a great place to be a part of, you know?” Chris agrees. “It’s like any big city; there are people from everywhere here. There are so many bands, so much competition. It’s hard to get your first show. You have to work that little bit harder to distinguish yourself at first.” “And for it being such a huge city,” continues Ira, “and for this huge mashing of subcultures, there’s also a pretty strong sense of community. They can be supportive, but they’re also very competitive – you’ve gotta keep your ass in gear. If you’re the sort of person who thrives on that, then you’ll gravitate towards that kind of environment. I mean, I lived in Austin for a while, but it’s not my kind of town. It’s awesome to visit, or Asheville, NC, or these other places that have these scenes, but the competition here is intense. In New York, everyone is a hustler.”
As Britain thaws from under the imposition of a featureless, train-stopping tundra, ‘Odd Blood’ is the record to warm our hands over and space-out our minds to; puffing our cheeks and tapping our watches in impatience to share it with the warmth of the summer sun. Just don’t say you think any of it sounds like MGMT. “You can get out that door right now!” says Chris, his hand clamped firmly on our boot. “Tell Mr. Branson to fly you straight home.” Yet, in the raucously camp glitterdome that is ‘O.N.E.’, and the mesmerising nano-musical of lead single ‘Ambling Alp’, the aim of the comparison is unshakeably accurate. Not that the band’s 2007 debut ‘All Hour Cymbals’ wasn’t wheezing under the weight of myriad pop hooks and immediate, catchy segments, it’s just that they were more abstractly presented, hidden behind and entwined with a mind-expandingly diverse range of bewitching worldbeat rhythms, hypnotic chanting, freakout pseudo-folk, and hocus-pocus futurism. As debut albums go, it was extravagant to say the least; that they pulled it off was nigh on unique. All of which makes talking to Yeasayer in person even more of an anomaly. You see, in normal circumstances, the rule of thumb goes something like this; the wackier and more out-there the music, the more boorish and miserable the artists. Put another way, the bigger the kaftan, the crapper the personality. Sitting here with the band and listening to them zig-zag between Paul McCartney’s album design budgets, conventional movie chat (Ira initially saw Avatar at the cinema in 2D, thus rendering the experience a complete waste of time) and the health of Jesus (sample quote, Anand: “Back then, 33 was old?” Ira: “Sure, if you got a sprained ankle or a broken finger, you didn’t get to go to the doctor. If you got a tooth infection that shit was going straight into your brain. You were as good as dead.”) is like trying to follow a supersonic pinball; on this evidence, the trio’s off-the-wall energy is tempered on record, not exacerbated. That Yeasayer have conjured the dazzling electro-psyche of ‘Odd Blood’ doesn’t represent a reinvention; it’s more of an archealogical extraction. ‘All Hour Cymbals” layers of quasi-prog have been eroded, revealing a more ostentatious, addictive whole. Whichever way you look at it, combined with their evolution from the provincial, handmade, We Are Free label onto EMI subsidiary Mute, it amounts to a tilt at the mainstream.
Begrudgingly, Chris concurs. “I felt like the first record just wasn’t put together in a way that was identifiable as such. People found and heard different things, but on this it’s kind of clear; the intention to hear the melody in certain songs is more pronounced. Writing ‘Odd Blood’ has been easier than writing the first album, too. That was harder because we were trying to write a record on our free time instead of for a job. We were trying to fit it in, plus on top of that you have no idea what you’re doing at all. It’s like learning to walk and to talk at the same time.” Making the switch to a bigger company, one with snazzy offices and a predeliction for Radio Friendly Unit Shifters must have been a shock too; surely the pressures from the label must have been multiplied – were they begging for the band to write a single? “Oh yeah,” says Chris. “I think at the end it was up to us, contractually they couldn’t really say anything, but they wanted to cut it down.”
“I had to fight against the head of Mute himself,” says Anand, before adopting his best Spinal-Tap-ese. “The guy at the label was like [in a British accent] “You do wanna be a pop band, right?” And we were like, no, we just like pop music, sometimes.” “We don’t have any kids,” says Chris straight-facedly, “so it’s not like we actually need to make any money.” Anand laughs, “Neil Young said that when ‘Heart Of Gold’ came out, it was number one and it put him in the middle of the road, so he headed for the ditch!” Chris grins. “Hopefully, if this album is successful, the next album, we can just throw it down the toilet. Have you heard the David Bowie album ‘Tonight’? The third track is a cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’. It’s terrible. So it’s gonna be like that; we’re gonna fuck it up so bad.” He reclines into his chair, tongue firmly wedged in his cheek. “This is the way it’s gonna be. We’re on EMI now.” We think that attitude’s more punk than pop, but we’re not gonna choose now as the moment to tell him…

‘Odd Blood’ is released on Mute on February 8th.