mute records | lp+cd/cd/i stumm321 | 08/02/2010
| track listing
Yeasayer signed to
Mute in the UK for the release of Odd Blood
(Odd Blood was released Stateside by Secretly Canadian).
The album follows their debut album (All Hour Cymbals released
2007 on We Are Free) and helped the band achieve proper, and deserved,
success. The trio of Anand Wilder (guitars / vocal
/ keyboards), Chis Keating (vocals / keyboards)
and Ira Wolf Tuton (bass guitar / backing vocals)
currently reside in Brooklyn, that hotbed of musical inventiveness
that seems to be able to produce high quality musicians like some
sort of enormous alternative talent machine. Odd Blood saw the trio
working with various additional musicians - Jason Trammell (drums),
Ahmed Gallab (various percussion), Jerry Marotta (drums / percussion),
Kevin Bewersdorf (synths / piano), Stuart Bogie (horns / harmonica
/ jaw's harp) and Steven Stetson (horns).
It took me a while to get into Odd Blood,
and I have Mrs S to thank for pushing me toward the album. I'll
buy and love anything released on Mute (hence this site), but for
some reason I couldn't drag myself to go out and buy Odd Blood;
maybe it was my normal hype aversion filter. It was also the case
back then that my avid collecting of Mute Records hadn't returned
with such forcefulness. Or perhaps it was the sleeve's digital amalgamation
of the three band members' heads into one mutant skull. The turning
point came when we downloaded 'O.N.E.' - later to become Odd
Blood's second single - for free from iTunes, after Mrs S had
heard the track on 6Music. My interest was sufficiently piqued to
finally go out and buy Odd Blood sometime during the summer
of 2010. At first I couldn't concentrate on its unusual electronic-but-not-quite-electronic
sheen, plus it sat way down the list in my iPod, all the way past
a clutch of various artists compilations, and so I hardly ever listened
to it.
Once I transcended this, I have come to regard Odd
Blood as one of the finest things I listened to in 2010. A
clue to its overall sound lies in that title's use of the word 'odd',
for Odd Blood is a very strange album indeed; not strange
as in unlistenable, far from it, but complicated, intricate and
unusual. Beats are undoubtedly beats but delivered in a heavily-processed
way; lyrics are elliptical, feeling like clipped personal stories,
the significance of which really only make sense to the band; the
electronics alternately shimmer and crackle like they were produced
with unpredictable, faulty equipment; nothing - including the infrequent
bursts of guitar or bass or horn sounds - sound like they haven't
been somehow tampered with, altered, skewed or just manipulated
almost to the point of unrecognisability. Consequently it's not
hard to see why Mute would have wanted to release this, as there's
enough of an echo of the early days of the label, or the Eighties
experimental pop of I Start Counting, to entirely
justify Yeasayer's inclusion on the label.
'Children', the album's opener, provides as strong
a signal as possible that this LP is going to be a strange one -
thudding beats that try to swing but don't quite, vocals that are
processed to the point of malevolence (think HAL 9000 with none
of that icy detachment) and brassy sounds. It has a sinister edge
that other tracks - like the stately singles 'Madder Red' or 'I
Remember' - don't have, but certainly makes the listener very aware
that this isn't going to be easy listening synth pop for the retro-synth-loving
fan. 'Children' is also the only track from the first half of the
album not to be released as a single.
That's not to say that the second half tails off,
far from it. 'Love Me Girl', effectively two songs - an upbeat,
mostly instrumental section that sidesteps, via a very KLF / 808
State-esque horse bray sound (well, how would you describe it?),
into a distinctly uptight electro-soul second half. I hear echoes
of Aphex Twin here for some reason. There's also a rolling piano
sound that wouldn't have sounded out of place in a traditional German
pub sing-a-long. It may not be my personal favourite track here,
but I do find its restlessness appealing. Plus it reminds me of
a song on Nik Kershaw's 'Human Racing', which always gets my vote.
The squelchy-bassed 'Rome', similarly, sounds like a musical echo
of the Eighties, like something by Fun Boy Three or a band like
that; an echo from a time where bands genuinely strived for a different
sound, before things got compressed, flattened and depressingly
derivative.
'Strange Reunions' has a clattering waltz dimension,
while the typically busy 'Mondegreen' has an insane, urgent swing,
all hyperactive vocals, handclaps and fried guitar. Oh, and sax
sounds. Eighties pop bands used to use sax all the time, an addition
which seemed to all of a sudden dry up; it's nice to see the instrument
finding a home in Yeasayer songs. This playful song straddles many
genres, but at its heart it seems to be an electro-ska oddity.
Closer 'Grizelda' (incidentally, a name I sometimes
use for either one of my young daughters when they're grumpy) mines
the same emotional vein as an 'I Remember' or 'Madder Red', namely
a plaintive love song (I think) with a similar emotional vibe. It
provides a suitably dramatic conclusion to an album which took this
interesting outfit a considerable way forward from All Hour
Cymbals. In a recent tweet, the band pondered on whether recording
85 songs for the new album might be a bit excessive. One can only
hope that that vast number of songs gets whittled down into something
as intriguing as Odd Blood.
lp+cd/cd/i:
1. The Children
2. Ambling Alp
3. Madder Red
4. I Remember
5. O.N.E.
6. Love Me Girl
7. Rome
8. Strange Reunions
9. Mondegreen
10. Grizelda
Note: in 2011, a 2CD edition was released in
the US by Secretly Canadian, with the second disc featuring a number
of the remixes available on the album's singles.
mute records | i mute427 | 27/11/2009 [single
track] / 01/01/2010 [ep] ] | track
listing
The first single from Yeasayer's
Odd Blood arrived in a sleeve with no words on it all,
just garish stripes of colour not too dissimilar from Nineties dance
videos; all it needs is a mandelbrot pattern and the likeness would
be perfect.
'Ambling Alp' starts with almost cod-ambient water
sounds and widens out into a ridiculously joyous track only enhanced
by emotional, emotive vocals. The drumming is a thing to behold
while the gaps between verses are plain weird in a pop track, very
reminiscent of Devo's 'Mr. B's Ballroom' from Freedom Of Choice.
The middle eight comes with impossibly high (and slightly treated)
vocals and some distinctly retro horn noise. It's one of those tracks
that makes you think 'This shouldn't work,' but yet does, and some.
'Stick up for yourself son / Never mind what anyone else done'
is the sagely paternal message proferred here. Which reminds me
of Joe Mangle in Neighbours getting punched out by his
young son after telling him to toughen up.
Two remixes and an instrumental version round off
the package. DJ Rupture & Brent Arnold's remix is all over the
place, a stop-start garage-y dub-bass shambles which does nothing
for me. Maybe it's just my tastes, but the Memory Tapes version
is at least a little better, recasting the track as a cheeky upbeat
electro-pop / disco collage with some odd melodies and sounds. Neither
mix comes close to the original; the instrumental version highlights
the strength - and oddness - of 'Ambling Alp' without resorting
to remix showmanship.
mute records | i mute435 | 26/03/2010 | track
listing
'O.N.E.' sounds 'like Haircut 100 at a Senegalese
block party jam,' said The Times, listing the second single
from Odd Blood as one of their tracks of 2010. Perhaps
it does, in a Eighties-pop-meets-Vampire-Weekend sort of way. Except
that the combination The Times referred to already
existed back in the day, and it was called Talking Heads. They
may have made New York their home, like Yeasayer,
but this sounds nothing like Byrne/Frantz/Harrison/Weymouth, though
the tight African-esque guitar wouldn't have gone amiss on their
swansong, Naked.
In reality, this is just a beautifully-rendered
example of eclectic pop. I don't know what they put in the water
over in Brooklyn, but it seems to produce unlikely musical convergences
of styles, all of which are achingly cool. 'O.N.E.' is a effervescent,
jerky, upbeat electronic hybrid, tempered by slightly downbeat vocals
signalling the (apparently) bitter end of a relationship. Lots of
echo on the vocal mask some of the emotion, making the track shimmer
and waver, as if with uncertainty that this was the intended way
this relationship was supposed to go.
Unlike the disappointing mixes of first single 'Ambling
Alp', XXXchange's remix reminds me of why I enjoyed dance music
in the first place. Insistent, sub-acid, buzzing synths with minimal
filtering and a driving urgency give this mix a naggingly euphoric
appeal. A real treat for the ears and the feet.
Also included is a demo of the track, which starts
as an Orb-esque ambient dub affair before opening out into something
not dissimilar to Duck Tails or their offspring, Real Estate, mixed
with traditional Japanese folk music musings. In many ways, just
by not being as familiar as the single, it sounds fresh and new,
and with its slightly less upbeat edge, it sounds yet more plaintive.
An instrumental version completes the EP, revealing a unusual stew
of hidden noises under the main vocal.
mute records | i mute439 | 10/09/2010 | track
listing
It took me a while to get into Odd Blood,
mainly because it sat at the very bottom of my iPod's playlists,
way down there after all those Various Artists compilations. When
I decided to absorb myself in it properly it was 'Madder Red' that
I couldn't get out of my head. With its drifting, echoing falsetto
harmony, it has the same emotional quality as MGMT's 'Time To Pretend',
which reduces me to a gibbering wreck every time I hear it. Stuttering
guitar and a stalking bassline add to a sense of restrained disappointment
or frustration.
The song is recast by The Golden Filter as a sort
of otherworldly digital funk, the first of its three movements seeming
to steal the main spindly electro rhythm from the Yazoo
B-side 'State Farm'. Via a section filled with intense drumming
the pace changes again and we get a section not dissimilar to a
duel between Yeasayer and the Erasure
B-side 'Ghost'; I can't say if that's just me attaching my (limited)
musical reference points to the remix or a genuine influence, but
either way I really like this mix.
I'm not struck on Henning Fürst's mix at all.
For a start, at least on iTunes, it's mastered way too quietly compared
to the other songs on the digital single; secondly, it fashions
'Madder Red' into a form of unwarranted, insipid Nineties R&B
that I hoped the world had forgotten about. There are a couple of
free remixes knocking about the blogosphere - Munk's excellent mix
(subsequently featured on Mute's Vorwärts
compilation) is a high-energy, uplifting, discotastic affair while
Little Loud heaps in all manner of accoutrements to render 'Madder
Red' even more emotion-heavy than the original. There's also a single
mix somewhere which I heard on 6Music one weekend. Despite loving
the aforementioned falsetto melody, the single mix over-uses it,
ending the track with the refrain repeated a few times too often.
The single also includes the video, effectively
a short film starring Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen
Bell which depicts the love between an aspiring actress and her
weird, deformed pet; it's sort of like a Boglin, if you remember
those. It fits the emotional quality of the track perfectly, depicting
the demise of said creature and the effect on its owner, though
the scenes showing pus and ichor oozing from the poor doomed creature
are a tad unnecessary. Check it out below.
mute records | i unknown | 14/02/2011 | track
listing
'I Remember' is a beautiful little song; just lovely.
A free EP of the album version and two mixes were released as a
download on Valentine's day 2011. All you needed to do was put a
loved one's email address into a form on the Yeasayer
website and a link popped into your inbox. Except that it never
worked for me and so I had to get my hands on this more creatively.
Something about this track reminds me of Kraftwerk's
'Hall Of Mirrors' thanks to the shimmering, glassy noises at the
very start, but what's more evident is a delicately wrought synth
track featuring layer upon layer of pretty melodies and sounds,
a simple, sporadically-deployed beat and some of the most wistful
lyrics I've heard in a love song. 'I remember thinking this
would never end,' is one of the most emotional lines, and the
whole thing has a vibe that is both sweetly poignant and tragically
moving. Like every other track on Odd Blood, Yeasayer prove
once again here that they are masters of drama and contradiction.
The Painted Palms remix retains the vocal and some
of the synths but adds on a retro beat and a squelchy bassline and
passes the whole thing through subtle sheen of reverb and echo to
give the mix an ethereal, hypnogogic quality not dissimilar to Hype
Williams or Toro Y Moi. The VILLA remix takes the tabla percussion
of the original, runs it through all sorts of effects to create
a bassline loop and adds wordless snatches of the main vocal over
a live-sounding drum pattern to give birth to something very different
to the original. It's good, but its attempts at drama are nowhere
near as successful as on the album version or the Painted Palms
mix.
mute records | 7"/i mute448 | 16/04/2011
[ i released 17/06/2011] | track
listing
End Blood collects together two tracks
that were not deemed to fit on to Odd Blood. The tracks
were released as a highly-limited and what from photos looks like
a pink 7" for Record Store Day 2011 (Mute
advised me that there were only 100 UK copies; that's actually beyond
highly-limited). Yeasayer, responding to the ridiculous
prices being paid for copies on eBay, stated that the tracks would
be released digitally, initially in the US and more recently in
the UK; that means I can delete the ripped Soundcloud streams I'd
been listening to previously.
Both tracks aren't quite as strong as other tracks
from Odd Blood admittedly, but they're quite cute in their
own distinct way; they may draw a line under the album, but they
also provide a relatively fresh perspective on a band who leapt
forward hugely with their second album.
'Swallowing The Decibels' is every bit as confusing
lyrically as anything on Odd Blood, and it's an outright
towering synth epic with flourishes that aim toward the sound of
Depeche Mode around Black Celebration.
This band, more than any other in this retro-futurist musical world
we find ourselves in, seem to have captured and distilled the essence
of Eighties synth pop and bathe every track in a subdued / euphoric
light which confounds me every time I hear one of their tracks.
'Phoenix Wind' consists of a phased vocal over a
plodding bass line, quirky synth riff (almost like an early Fairlight
horn) and chopped up guitar plucking that sounds like a dreamy echo
of an Eighties hit. Whilst not necessarily as well formed or as
complete as 'Swallowing The Decibels', 'Phoenix Wind' has a curious
charm, like an early Nik Kershaw track perhaps. 'Nothing's as it
seems / When your nightmare's healing your dreams' is the profound
fortune cookie wisdom on offer here. As is so often the case with
this band, I don't get the message, but I quite like the song, and
that's all that matters.
Heralding the Record Store Day release, here's what
the Yeasayer website had to say: 'End Blood consists of
two ideas that didn't fit on Odd Blood. They were tucked
away in a drawer until today. We are releasing these two tracks
to purge our brains and make way for new sounds / ideas and more
importantly to support Record Store Day.'
