I’m going to admit something; I was not exactly over the moon for All Hour Cymbals. I liked it, and could appreciate what other people seemed to really love about it, but the album just didn’t seem to resonate with me like it did some listeners. This being the case, I put off actually listening to Odd Blood for quite a while when it was released. I kept meaning to get around to giving it a spin, but it seemed like I never quite had the motivation to do so. That was a mistake because this album flat out kicks ass. As enjoyable as the ambient and folky elements of the band’s debut may have been, the album veers completely off that path and right into what is my musical wheel-house. To put it simply, Odd Blood takes everything that I enjoy about 80′s pop music and combines it with everything that I really enjoy in the modern indie and electronic genres.
The lead single should have been plenty of evidence that Yeasayer was going to go running in a slightly different direction with Odd Blood. ”Ambling Alp” with its booming hook of “stick up for yourself son, never mind what anybody else done,” was obviously meant to be more chorus driven than anything on the first album. Yet, somehow, this managed to go right over my head. Upon my first listen to the LP I found myself similarly tapping my foot along with the heavy drums of “Madder Red.” Then I was completely taken in by the woozy synths of “I Remember,” as by the song’s end I found myself singing along to the chorus of “you’re stuck in my mind, all the time.” But it was probably somewhere toward the middle of the maddeningly catchy “O.N.E.” – during which I kept finding my arm reached outward, turning up the volume – that it first started dawning on me that I was listening to something pretty special. All in all, while I would quickly discover that the entire album was pretty damn solid, the stretch between “Ambling Alp” and “Rome,” in particular, mark one of the strongest six song sets that I have heard in years. At this point I have probably played the grooves right off this CD, and not a single one of the songs in that group have even started to lose any of the charms that I heard on the very first listen.
Out of that group of standouts, it’s probably “O.N.E.” (which is marked to be the second single) that is probably my very favorite out of the bunch. The song packs a serious punch, and boasts a chorus that grabs hold of your brain and simply refuses to unleash it, and at the end of the track (at about the four and a half minute mark) there is an almost Jackson-esque set of backing vocals that almost sent me spilling from my chair in excitement. The song also provides a nice setup for “Love Me Girl,” where the bottom almost drops out from pace the album seems to be on, and throws you the perfect curveball of electronic weirdness that not only recalls their previous album but perhaps a bit of Depeche Mode for good measure.
It’s probably no small secret to anybody who has read any tangent that I have gone on regarding music in the eighties that I am a fan of David Byrne and the Talking Heads. In fact, I probably get a bit too carried away at times using the Talking Heads as a measuring stick for bands that I like or as a basis for comparison. However, having said that, there were numerous points across Odd Blood where I heard much of what I really loved about the Talking Heads music in Yeasayer’s songs. This was especially true on “Rome,” where I felt like I could have been listening to a Talking Heads track, the sound was just that fucking dead on. And believe me, while I’m probably doing Yeasayers a disservice by almost suggesting that this song was completely aping another band’s style, I really do say this with utmost of love, and consider it some pretty high praise.
While it is the middle stretch of Odd Blood that marks the album’s sweet spot, it really bears saying that the whole thing is pretty damned consistent. The energy that the band bursts out of the gate with really doesn’t dissipate at all until the last track fades out. ”Mondegreen,” for example, seems to possess all the nervous tics and spazzy jerks of a classroom full of kindergardeners with ADHD, but it all seems strangely cohesive under the band’s watchful guidance. The song also segues beautifully into the fuzzy blips and hums of the closing track “Grizelda,” which, similarly to “Love Me Girl,” recalls All Hour Cymbals a bit more than the rest of the album.
Really it’s pretty astonishing how drastic a change Yeasayer made in their sound between this sophomore album and their debut, which was pretty acclaimed in its own right. It was an extremely ballsy move which could have backfired gloriously, but instead paid off with some serious dividends. It’s nothing short of incredible how seamlessly this group of youngsters was able to shift gears and completely master a new sound after so impressively bursting onto the scene with a debut that, despite my lack of passion for it, displayed a mastery beyond their years. It really lends even more credence to the idea that right now that Brooklyn is ground zero for the best new experimental music. While Odd Blood comes a year after the explosion of some other Brooklyn bands (i.e. Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, and the Dirty Projectors) into the mainstream, Yeasayer makes sure that you know that it was worth the wait.
SCORE: 4.6 out of 5.0
