Words by Max Feldman
The new possibilities provided by the internet and downloading have made the major labels quiver. Attacked by marketing panic, they churn out distended ‘deluxe editions’, which the consumer can find, wheezing and diabetic, at all good stores. A particularly good example of this phenomenon is in the thirty extra tracks of Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!!. Already a twenty song long excursion into snarling, riotous, soul punk, it’s difficult to imagine the target market for a deluxe edition.
Contrary to this trend, Yeasayer’s Odd Blood is an avant-pop record with emphasis on accessibility. It recalls Talking Heads at their most thrumming and afrodelic, while also sounding both like Dirty Mind-era Prince and Erasure. Admittedly, it has a lower genius quotidian than Prince, but it clearly invests its trust fund in Vince Clarke’s bubblegum stock. Accepting the latter in the listening experience is an act of pop-doublethink. Chuck Klosterman deconstructed the idea of the “guilty pleasure” six years ago, but there’s no other way of describing this absurd syllogism. For some, Erasure represent everything resentful about cowboy kitsch. However, Odd Blood is an enjoyable record but contains elements of Andy Bell’s holler throughout, especially on “Madder Red” or the psyche-tropical “O.N.E.” It’s as difficult to see how they can be reconciled as discerning musical trinkets in a bloated selection of demos and live cuts.
The solution is found in accepting that, on Odd Blood, Yeasayer’s real forebears are XTC. They share a love of lustrous orchestration and unapologetic vocal cadences. Meanhile, where XTC’s Oranges and Lemons contained multiple overdubs, Odd Blood’s panning gossamer synths transcend the normal boundaries for a three-piece. Most important of all, though, is how fanatically poppy this record is: it is ten songs long; it has a cohesive structure that provides each song with contextually appropriate neighbours; it has choruses. At no point do we wish that a slick, suited, record executive, determined to extend our experience, interrupt our listening. It makes a nice change.
It’s a sacramental pop record, and Chris Keating sounds evangelical throughout. Over the album’s course, he leads a New Testament syllables-to-scales ratio: he’s a born-again Brooklynite, and Odd Blood is his megachurch. Lyrically, Keating is in a motivational mood. On lead single “Ambling Alp”, he delivers dinky twee-pop couplets like a new wave Deepak Chopra, or as if he were doing free weights with self-help books. There are, however, hidden depths to this record. The subtext of Keating’s lyrics are scrambled by their schizophrenic genre-hopping. This takes Odd Blood from pure earnest into something more complex. and Keating’s roles range from “Aimee Mann’s estranged nephew” to cartographer of the John Hughes-Dawson’s Creek continuum, sometimes both at once.
On opener “The Children”, his effaced vocals sound like Karin Dreijer Anderson’s haunted androgyny, while “Rome” and “Mondegreen” shudder. They are delivered with the sort of rockabilly urgency that, once upon a time, would have made Yeasayer unwelcome guests on The Ed Sullivan Show. The latter, a cosmic rockin’ lindy hop, concerns the sort of self-voyeurism one might find in the celebrity blogosphere, met with 4/4 applause. “I Remember”, meanwhile, pines for recollections of romance, a synthesised slow dance filtration of prom dresses and rotating disco lights. This sheer variety makes Odd Blood such a reward, overturning expectations at every opportunity. Much of its predecessor’s bourgeois worldbeat ecotourism is gone. In its place is the sort of lived-in eccentricity that lesser artists would take twice as many tracks to express. Now find your own way of pronouncing their name (Secretly Canadian, 2010).
