Clap Your Hands, Say Yea
They used to be droney and mysterious but now MGMT’s best mates YEASAYER have gone all pop. With a bit of luck, they might even be giving Rihanna a run for her money on the dancefloor.
Ed Power, 19 Mar 2010
Sitting shirtless and pale in a cramped backstage dressing area, Yeasayer’s Chris Keating rolls his eyes and sighs. “Rolling Stone said a bunch of things about us that were basically untrue,” he says. “They said our new album was inspired by taking hallucinogenics in New Zealand.”
So RS made the whole thing up?
Taylor shrugs: “Well, we did take hallucinogenics. And we WERE in New Zealand at the time. But we’d already written most of the album. It certainly wasn’t inspired by that. This isn’t a drug record. We would hate for anyone to come away thinking that.”
The last we heard of Yeasayer, the bearded trio were lost in a haze of sitars, tribal drumming and chanted vocals (while there was plenty to love about their debut LP, All Our Cymbals, nobody could argue it was crying out wall to wall radio-play). They return a band transformed – new album Odd Blood is a no-holds barred pop record, ripe with glistening beats and beyond addictive melodies. With the right promotion, Keating sincerely believes it could give Rihanna a run for her money.
“Did we set out to write something catchy? Absolutely,” mods Keating, who says he is deeply honored that the single ‘Ambling Alp’ has received a thumbs-up from trend surfer supreme Kanye West on his blog. “We’ve always approached songwriting from that perspective – we set ourselves a challenge and then write about it. We want to be out there in the clubs, giving Rihanna a run for her money. Nobody wants to write music that only their loved ones get to hear. That’s not the kind of band we're interested in being. We want people to hear our shit.”
With its giggly day-glo ambience and hedonistic rush, Odd Blood has seen the Brooklynites hailed as this year’s MGMT (no matter that the real MGMT will shortly be back in action). As it so happens, this is a subject Keating is ideally placed to comment on.
“We toured with MGMT just as it was all taking off for them. From the very start, it was obvious to us that they deserved to be huge. The way we saw it was that, if there was any justice in the world, these guys would do incredibly well.”
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