Yeasayer’s track ‘Tightrope’ was a highlight of last year’s excellent Dark Was The Night compilation. As with the band’s first album All Hour Cymbals, the track expertly combined indie-cool with more experimental, electronic music with stunning effect.
Sadly Odd Blood the second album from the Brooklyn based band fails to live up to expectation.
There is simply too much eighties synth pop here. Instead of merging styles they have seemingly forgotten their more avant garde leanings and just plumped for lame euro-pop instead.
It’s like they picked the wrong ’80s to draw influence from. Instead of the bleeps of the Human League and Ultravox they’ve opted for the kind of soulless rubbish that ice-skaters would have danced to at the time.
The lack of good melody is another factor in the poor state of Odd Blood. Apart from ‘O.N.E’ and ‘Ambling Alp’, there is little to remember.
Even when the album does try and be a bit more experimental, it falls flat. The dour opener ‘children’ is a case in point. It is just a plodding mess, unlistenable rather than oddball.
Lead singer Chris Keates nasally, almost yodelling style voice doesn’t help. While it worked well on ‘Tightrope’ and All Hour Cymbals, on Odd Blood he just sounds whiney.
Lyrically there is not much going on either. Even the best track ‘Ambling Alp’ has some pretty lame lyrics, “You must stick up for yourself, son Never mind what anybody else done.” Not as inspiring as Yeasayer had perhaps hoped. Also, Tightrope’s chorus was built around the word ‘nevermind’ as well. Perhaps a thesaurus would help when it comes to their next release.
Yeasayer have produced a really disappointing album that fails to build on the plaudits they received last year through their contribution on Dark Was The Night and their first album.
4/10
by Joe Lepper, Feb 2010
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