Strange bedfellows

Proving that New York's thriving alternative music scene is not just a club of countless post-Strokes copycats, a new breed of bands including MGMT, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Chairlift and Yeasayer, to name but a few, have broken the shackles of corporate control and refuse to be boxed into any genre.

Hailing from Brooklyn, Yeasayer started playing together in 2007, apparently with a desire to be the most un-hip band on the planet, a plan that soon backfired as excitable bloggers elevated the band to mass critical acclaim. 

Mixing Middle Eastern and African sounds with dub and folk, Yeasayer has a natural talent for crafting infectiously catchy pop tunes from a global perspective. The band's crafty plagiarism brings to mind everyone from David Byrne and Peter Gabriel to Fleetwood Mac and even the tribal drumming of Animal Collective.

Yeasayer's 2007 debut album All Hour Cymbal manages to sound both tribal and futuristic, which is appropriate, given the band's description of their sound as "Middle Eastern psych snap-gospel." Despite such diverse influences, lead vocalist and guitarist Chris Keating says the band's bottom line is intelligent songwriting and "super vocal music," which, he adds, is not unique to Yeasayer.

"It seems a lot of other people have that idea in Brooklyn, as well," he said. "Everyone's excited about singing again and not just singing through an amplifier and playing disco beats. We're influenced by everything and not one specific sound, and we filter all the music we like into something that's unique. That's our only goal. We don't want to sound derivative of anything else."

As a singer, Keating is quite unique in his ability to change tone and pitch in the space of a single song (disco falsetto, anyone?). Keating says he and guitarist and vocalist Anand Wilder honed their voices as members of a barbershop quartet in Baltimore, Maryland, before moving to New York, where they teamed up with Wilder's cousin Ira Wolf Tuton on bass and Luke Fasano on drums.

Yeasayer's lyrics are dense with mystic revelry and often require a great deal of contemplation. The band's debut single "2018," for example, is both morose and euphoric. "I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in / I can't sleep when I think about the future I was born into / Outsiders dressed up like Sunday morning / With no Berlin Wall what the hell are you gonna do?" Keating sings.

Despite a deep dig into the sounds of the 1980s, Yeasayer shows little sign of a sophomore slump on their follow-up album Odd Blood, which was released last year. Retro while embracing modern digital sounds, Odd Blood grows on you with each new listen.

The idea with Odd Blood, Wilder said, was "to be more direct and commit more wholeheartedly to a style or sentiment." To do so, the band rented percussionist Jerry Marotta's country home in upstate New York, turning the living room into a makeshift studio.

Marotta's experience playing with Peter Gabriel, Dream Academy and Paul McCartney certainly rubbed off on the band, particularly on tracks like "Ambling Alp," where he contributes some Native American Taos drums.

The complexity of Yeasayer's sound on Odd Blood has earned the band the label "world beat," but Anand says it's difficult to reproduce the tracks live.

"Ideally, we wish we could all just take a pill that would turn us into machines so we could play it perfectly," Anand jokes. "At least, I would!"

To help matters, the three-piece turns into a five-piece for live gigs. As Keating puts it, "Bands sound so boring when their songs are played live the exact same way as they are on record." And he's got a point.

James Scanlon can be reached at
features@praguepost.com