Top of the Pops

Yeasayer braces for the breakout rollercoaster

By: Matt Fink

To the extent that the indie rock aesthetic has generally been defined by standing in opposition to the music that dominates Top 40 radio, the last ten years have provided numerous challenges to that integrity vs. the commerciality dynamic. First, Justin Timberlake turned up on stage with the Flaming Lips and on hipster “best of” lists. Then, Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone” became the favorite cover song of indie bands, just as everyone from of Montreal to Grizzly Bear mentioned Beyonce as an inspiration. By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, indie rockers were all over the pop charts and pop music was all over indie rocker’s iPods. With Odd Blood, Yeasayer set out to prove that even 80s pop deserves a second act.

“I like using the word ‘pop,’ but I don’t really know what it means anymore,” says vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Chris Keating. “I want it to sound alien. For the textures, if they’re tribalistic in any way, it’s like an alien culture. Not really as earthly as the first record. That first record conceptually was all about the choral sound and that became the aesthetic of the first record. And for this record, we decided, ‘Let’s blow away some of that haze and reveal some more of the clarity.’ That’s putting your balls on the table a little more, pushing the vocals up. It was more of a pop sensibility.”

The product of three months spent in the isolation of a snowbound Woodstock, New York studio, the Brooklyn trio’s follow-up to 2007’s All Hour Cymbals is a powerhouse pop album by any definition. Built out of complex polyrhythms and vintage 80s synth textures, the album is part New Order, part Animal Collective, its constituent pieces ranging from the sexed up funk of “Love Me Girl” to the bubbly dance-pop of “Ambling Alp.” And while Yeasayer’s early trajectory landed them well ahead of the curve in their blending of African pop and day-glo psychedelia, there is hardly a trace of their debut’s exploratory mix on Odd Blood.

“I think that’s important,” Keating says of the band’s reinvention. “That’s what my favorite artists always did, switched record to record. I think in this day and age, it’s not like we’re a skiffle group that is influenced by American blues. There’s this whole wealth of crazy influences at your disposal, and I’m of the age that I grew up listening to hip-hop and rock and electronic stuff pretty equally. It wasn’t like I was a metalhead or anything. I was always listening to a lot of different stuff, and I’d like to make music that reflects that in some way.”

Their roots stretching back to when Keating and vocalist/keyboardist Anand Wilder were classmates at Baltimore’s Park School (the same high school where Animal Collective’s members attended a few years earlier), Yeasayer formed only after both had finished college and grown tired of attempting to establish themselves as solo artists. Bringing Wilder’s cousin Ira Wolf Tuton in to fill out the lineup, the trio began to make music based upon the idea of balancing the organic with the synthetic, wrapping acoustic guitars in analog drums and vintage keyboards. And while Odd Blood swings the balance toward the electronic, the lyrics keep it rooted in the viscerally tangible.

“We thought the record was very physical, and we wanted the title to reference physicality, like, blood and guts and gore,” Keating says. “We were always dealing with these ideas for what we wanted it to sound like, like, ‘It should sound like bones crunching.’ And the fact that it’s electronic and dancey and futuristic, the phrase ‘odd blood’ seemed like some futuristic slang that people would use in a post-globalized homogenous world – a phrase for someone that sticks out.”

Back in this world, Odd Blood is the kind of record that ensures Yeasayer will stand out, its baffling mix of familiarity and otherworldliness making it both immediately accessible and puzzlingly obtuse. If their goal was to make one weird-ass pop record, one festooned with obvious reference points that are all aiming in opposite directions, they’ve succeeded. If their goal was to reach the pop charts, they might have to be happy with missing their mark.

“Honestly, I kind of thrive on people telling me the record sucks,” Keating says. “That’s a lot better than saying they like it but it sounds like everything else.”

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