Yeasayer/ Odd Blood

Yeasayer
Odd Blood
(Mute)
 
After Yeasayer’s 2007 album All Hour Cymbals had them traveling the musical globe, their latest offering sees the New York trio searching for far-flung fantasy lands.

For ‘Odd Blood’, the band ensconced themselves in the house of former Peter Gabriel drummer Jerry Marotta and emerged with an album that fuses New World rhythms with New Wave synths and has more pseudo-tribal tracks than Paul Simon could shake a stick at.

Opener ‘The Children’ sounds like an autotuned ringwraith fronting a junkyard orchestra, ‘Rome’ sounds like collaboration between the Star Wars Cantina band and a gaggle of Morrocan buskers, whilst the operatic, expanding-cloud synths of ‘I Remember’ could have been on the soundtrack of kids fantasy classic The Never Ending Story.

This eclectic approach usually works well, but at points Yeasayer risk falling on the annoying side of experimental music. The incessant zombie-polka of ‘Mondegreen’ with its insane yammering of “Everybody Everybody Everybody” over and over, as an unhinged saxophone screeches in the background quickly becomes nightmarish stuff as you fumble for the volume control on your iPod.

As an album Odd Blood peaks too early as nothing quite reaches the heights of lead single and second track, ‘Ambling Alp’. Said to be inspired by Joe Louis, the 1930s Afro-American boxing champ who “gave fascists hell” when he defeated both Nazi poster-boy Max Schmeling and the original Ambling Alp, the Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera, the track is a 3 minutes of juddering glory, an 80s echo chamber with an inspirational refrain at its core.

Both provocative and divisive, ‘Odd Blood’ is like ‘world’ music from another planet, and its likely to be one of the most original records of the year.