All Hour Cymbals - Yeasayer

Track List:

1. Sunrise
2. Wait for the Summer
3. 2080
4. Germs
5. Ah, Weir
6. No Need to Worry
7. Forgiveness
8. Wait for the Wintertime
9. Worms
10. Waves
11. Red Cave

Running time: 46 minutes
Released: 2007

I was sold on Yeasayer by a performance of 2080 on Later... With Jools Holland. 

I picked up this album, and (later) Odd Blood, which I found too odd to like. I am not sure how well this stands up (I find the above-linked video cringeworthy now - mostly for the singer's antics), but I have fond memories of both that tune and the opener, Sunrise. The rest of the album does not conjure any specific recollections.

Sunrise (free on LastFM) is fairly cute, jazzy bass combined with odd sounds and an affective vocal, it all comes together pretty well for the first half of the song, but the latter half is an over-long outro where nothing really changes and it plays out to boredom. I hope that is not a sign of things to come.

Wait for the Summer is... yeah, what was I thinking here? Look the styling of the arrangements I quite like - the elements used to craft this song are all reasonable but they come together as a tangled mess - the worst offender the ridiculously over-levelled percussive bells that dominate. It feels rudderless in a way that neither Sunrise nor 2080 (also available free on LastFM) do. Speaking of 2080, I have little doubt that this is the best crafted track on the album - a great hook, big brash sound and accessible. Whilst I cannot watch that vid linked above without tensing, listening to the album version stimulates the original love of the track. It feels tight, well constructed and most importantly catchy. I do not really care for the vocal but it suits the track OK... the main draw is the hook, but even after that fades there is interest and coherence in the track. It does end rather weakly though.

I am not expecting much from the remaining tracks - there is too much of a hippy-ish "out there" tinge to Yeasayer for my appreciation. I find some of it atonal, and other bits of it boring. There are flits of interest around the edges of tracks but nothing as big and statement-like, or as successful in fusing their "freakier" elements with good old fashioned radio-friendly music as 2080.  I hope that somewhere here there is a gem I have forgotten but I am sceptical, mostly because of the vocalist. His style does not appeal, and I cannot get those performing antics out of my head.

Honestly, I cannot quite believe I bought Odd Blood based on this experience. Forgiveness is the next track that holds my attention for any time thanks to interesting hooks again. Unfortunately it has a horrid atonal opening, a "feature" that recurs through its length - I cannot even begin to describe the sound well, but I find it offensive. And that is a shame because I like the parts of the song which do not have it obliterating the more musical tones. I will be trimming down what I hold from this disc, the only question is how much will be left?

I am probably making a false association but something about the music of Wait for the Wintertime reminds me of early Pink Floyd (who seem to be getting a lot of passing mentions!). Specifically A Saucerful of Secrets, though I freely admit my actual memories of that album are practically confined to the line "set the controls for the heart of the sun" so the importance of the parallel is questionable. I think the song may pass the keep test though. It feels a little bit directionless but I quite like the main hook and I find the "weirdness" less intrusive on this one.

Then we hit an interesting point where the track titles in my library do not match those in the legend here. This time I am pretty sure mine are wrong - but looking one of them up ("Many Waves" in place of Worms, Worms in place of "Waves") suggests I may not be alone. A quick check of my CD (running up and down the stairs) confirms that when this got ripped I trusted a borked source to title tracks correctly - but also doesn't give a name for track 11. Oddities like this annoy me and so I have just renamed the tracks... even though I am about to delete them because neither inspire me.

That missing track 11 from the CD, Red Cave, is probably the most pleasant sound on the album. Or it would be if the song was a minute long. The problem with the pleasantness is that it is very dull and goes on for 3:30 before it devolves into a badly delivered vocal and atonal backing. 

I think this is the frustrating thing for me here: Yeasayer clearly have some talent, and demonstrated with 2080 that they could fuse more mainstream song forms with elements of New Weird America to create something different and exciting. Alas it seems that was a moment of alchemy and not a reproducible effect. All Hour Cymbals is a lot less interesting than I remember, and I found it genuinely unpleasant in places, so it goes - with only two freely available tracks to mark its passing; in hindsight Wait for the Wintertime does not pass muster for retention.