Here it is:
A review of Yeasayer at the Orange Peel
By Chall Gray
I stared into the face of Trendy, and it reflected my image back at me from it’s cheap, plastic sunglasses with neon colored frames. Whether you’re ready for it or not, I’m here to tell you that the 80’s are back.
The first band up last Monday at the Orange Peel was Javelin, a two-piece from Brooklyn, who had their drum pad and synthesizers set up behind a large pile of boomboxes. Sadly, the music was less interesting than the stage dressing. For any band whose style is highly characterized by a musical trend of yesteryear–and though this may seem like a hasty generalization, I can think of numerous examples, both good and bad, which I’ll omit for the sake of space – there needs to be a certain amount of innovation mixed with derivation of whichever out-moded genre they inhabit. This was what was absence from Javelin’s sound. That is not to say they didn’t have a several catchy, danceable songs, but I feel like I either heard these songs running in the background of VH1’s “I Love the 80’s” or perhaps they were accidentally left off a tape released by Milli Vanilli (whom my companion thought they sounded most like).
After Javelin’s rather short set (30 minutes), and a 40 minute break, the near capacity crowd was definitely ready for Yeasayer. And they did not disappoint. By their second song, “Rome” nearly everyone in the Orange Peel was moving, responding to Chris Keating’s high vocals, and the driving bass beat set by Ira Wolf Tuton.
Yeasayer is a difficult band to categorize – a fact which makes them one of the most interesting groups currently out there, to me at least. They certainly evoke more than a few knowing winks and nods to the 80’s, especially on their newest album, Odd Blood, but it’s never cloying or overly derivative. There are bits of reggaeton beats, shades of Iraqi and Lebanese pop music, hints of 1970’s hits. It almost gives the impression that, in this new age of music, the knowledgeable fan isn’t supposed to be able to pinpoint a band’s originality, but rather be able to recognize their allusions. What makes Yeasayer a great band is not that they are able to utilize all of these seemingly disparate influences and allusions, but that they’re able to seamlessly and competently meld them together with their talented instrumentation.
The arrangements that they played at the Orange Peel were much more dance-oriented than those on the record – this may sound far-fetched in regards to certain songs, such as their hit single “Ambling Alp” for example, but the addition of a fifth musician, playing keyboards, synths, and guitar made the sound and the arrangements irresistible. My only disappointment was that they didn’t play “Red Cave,” the final song of their first album, and a track that almost patently defies having a dance beat forced upon it. I admit that, in the context of the set they played, it would surely have been an incongruity, but the fans in attendance would have accepted anything from this band–rapt as we were from the moment they strode upon stage.
When they were first beginning to emerge, in the lead-up to their debut, All Hour Symbols, which came out in late 2007, Yeasayer presented themselves as stridently anti-hip. They wore their hair halfway down their backs, un-ironic mustaches, purposefully unhip clothes from the 80’s and 90’s. But their anti-trend is now fast becoming ubiquitous – case in point the youth I saw at the show wearing large throwback sneakers, skinny light-blue washed out jeans, and a freshly cut mullet that came just below the neck of his suitably gauche t-shirt.
But, luckily for the band, they are good enough that they won’t have to worry about whether the trends continue to follow them or not – their music will transcend the prevailing fads of whatever moment it emerges into.
Chall Gray is a producer and freelance writer based in Asheville.