Yeasayer
Odd Blood
Secretly Canadian
February 9th, 2010
leaked on December 10th, 2009

by Justin Valmassoi

To say there is serious anticipation for Yeasayer’s sophomore album is like saying I enjoy watching drunk 22 year old girls kissing at parties. It’s like, “Duh. Obviously.” Basically everyone with a pulse is at least mildly interested how Brooklyn’s most talented batch of neo-hippie songsmiths are planning to follow up the unique blend of organic and electronic tones they so deftly laid beneath harmonies and handclaps for 2008’s ‘All Hour Cymbals’ and whether that follow up will be worth the wait and the hand wringing and the hours upon hours we’ve spent high, sitting around the coffee table drinking cough syrup and going, “Yeah, but is it going to be all wee-AH-wee, boo-ooo hippie banjo shit like that ‘Tightrope’ song from Dark Was The Night or will they get that live show vibe a la their Pitchfork.tv Don’t Look Down session, and is that camembert cheese? I love camembert. Who brought that? Can I have some?”



By now, most of you have heard lead single ‘Ambling Alp’ with its percussion-driven neo-disco beat and “stick up for yourself” positivity, and perhaps you’ve even taken a handful of mushrooms and watched its obviously mushroom influenced video a couple hundred times while peeling the varnish from your entertainment center in a hallucinogenic feedback loop. I know I have. If so, then you’ve actually got a pretty good grasp of what’s in store on Odd Blood. Aside from opening track ‘Children’ (which sounds like some insectile hive mind trying to force English through its mandibles over a menacing industrial drumbeat and low end piano stabs), Yeasayer have swapped pedals and ProTools for their tambourines and backup choirs, and the remainder of the album sounds a lot like Merriweather Post Pavillion-era Animal Collective covering Genesis for 40 minutes, and if you could stop making that horrible groaning noise I will try to explain why that’s actually a good thing, or at least not as bad a misstep as it sounds.

So the bad news first: There’s nothing here that sounds at all like ‘2080’. In fact, there are almost no harmonies on Odd Blood at all. Chris Keating has stepped forward as the frontman, and the percussion which used to be buried in the mix is not only front and center it’s more or less the driving element to all of these songs. Yeasayer’s pulled out dancefloor jams and pedal effects ballads, and everything is crisp and pretty and polished up like the mirrored faces of the ‘Ambling Alp’ video boxers.

Good news? It’s Yeasayer, and they make the transition seamlessly. Also, for a band this dexterous with sound manipulation and the ability to wrangle pop elements from the most unlikely of noises, the shift from studio layering and maracas to electronic textures and Keating’s best Talking Heads impersonation seems almost natural. After all, most of these songs have been making the rounds for months in their live sets, so people know what’s coming, and while the record feels a little front loaded, you have to admit All Hour Cymbals had a pretty fair amount of filler tracks, so while Odd Blood might not be the follow-up people expect, it’s actually a more solid record from front to back.

‘Madder Red’ sounds like Genesis, ‘I Remember’ is the lying-on-blanket-reminiscing-about-love-in-falsetto swoon fest, ‘ONE’ is amusing for dropping “You don’t move me like you used to,” over a beat that basically demands movement, there’s a three song stretch where it seems like the band just wanted to see how many different sounds and styles (sometimes at once) could be lashed to the framework of a pop song, ‘Mondegreen’ sounds like Cymbals’ ‘Forgiveness’ sped up to 128bpm and they round it out with ‘Grizelda’, which marries a slow, methodical progression with stuttering handclaps and does in fact rehash the band’s former penchant for layered vocal harmonies, bringing this experiment full circle.

Get past the initial shock of their stylistic shift and you’ll find Yeasayer have delivered on all of the promise of their debut in ways you really didn’t see coming. The only thing new is the fact that their live sets will change from psychedelic light shows and handclaps to psychedelic light shows, handclaps and dancing.

I can live with that.