Formed in: 2006, Brooklyn, New York
Key Albums: All Hour Cymbals (2007), Odd Blood (2010)
Yeasayer are a quartet that accomplishes no small task: transcending genre. Though peers of pastiche acts MGMT and Chairlift, Yeasayer can be seen as successors to the genre-defying Brooklyn scene defined by trailblazing, boundary-razing acts like Animal Collective, Black Dice, and Gang Gang Dance.
Yeasayer make a baroque folk-rock that sounds both futurist and tribalist at once; fashioning a casually-indefinable collage of four-part harmonies, junkyard percussion, horror-movie synth squelches, and spidery guitar-lines.
“I think that’s definitely one of the things that gets me off,” confesses impeccably-named bassist Ira Wolf Tuton. “What we’re setting out to do, [is] not back ourselves into a corner. It’s not something that’s incidental; I think it’s definitely a mission-statement of ours. Because once you’re in a corner you’re in that corner. Once bands are in genres, it’s very hard for them to redefine themselves. It’s a stubborn business in a stubborn world.”
Background
Yeasayer’s roots stretch back to the Park School of Baltimore, the liberal high-school from which Animal Collective grew. Vocalist/keyboardist Chris Keating and guitarist/vocalist Anand Wilder were both in school a few years below Animal Collective’s oddballs. Though Wilder and Keating looked up to the elder oddballs, their initial musical experiments were more straight-laced.
“Our high-school band was called Transit,” Wilder recounts. “We were very into The Cars, The Clash, Pavement, Weezer, The Rentals, Built to Spill; if you heard us right now, you’d pick all those reference points.”
After heading their separate ways for college (Keating in Rhode Island, Wilder in Pennsylvania), the pair came together in New York, oncemore inspired by their fellow Park School alumni. “When I saw [Animal Collective] become successful touring musicians,” says Wilder, “I kind of realized: ‘hey, this isn’t so hard!’ If you have ambition and good ideas, you can take this as far as you want to go.”
Wilder had spent his years at Penn working on his own ambitious project: an Americana musical named Break Line, a tale of striking coal-miners in 19th century Pennsylvania openly inspired by the Will Oldham-starring John Sayles movie Matewan.
Keating had been living in New York, performing solo as Diamond Eagle, but had grown tired of the lone-wolf act. So, he invited Wilder and Wilder’s cousin, Tuton, up from Baltimore and on stage. Soon thereafter, Keating decided he wanted it to be a band. After roping in drummer Luke Fasano, a former member of frenetic no-wave outfit Ex-Models, Yeasayer set about forging their identity.
Beginnings
“One of our very first practices, three years ago, me and Chris sat down and came up with the structure of 'Sunrise,'” Wilder recounts. “We said ‘this song’s going to have a cheesy bass solo, it’s going to have synth drums, but playing a tribal beat, and I’m going to play bells on my synth-guitar,’ We didn’t want to stress too much about sounds being ‘off limits,’ but make everything acceptable.”
“We wanted, from the very outset, to not do anything traditional. We didn’t want to be a straight rock-band. We definitely wanted to be very, very vocal-oriented. We wanted to wed the organic with the electronic; if we were going to have an acoustic guitar, then we had to match that with a synth-pad drum. We wanted to be an accurate reflection of the music that was available to us, and the music that inspires us. We didn’t want to just focus on one genre, we wanted to put things together in new and interesting ways.”
Arrival
Over the first year of their existence, Yeasayer worked "in a bubble." Yet, over time, the band started to connect with other outfits from New York, acts they toured with in the early days including Grizzly Bear, Quinn Walker, Chairlift, and MGMT. "The idea of a community pre-dating the band is kind of a myth,” Wilder warns.
They first found attention outside of NY at the SXSW festival early in 2007. After releasing their first single, "2080," Yeasayer finished off their impressive debut LP, All Hour Cymbals.
Released to a warm critical reception, the record elevated Yeasayer, almost immediately, into the ranks of important indie acts; a thought evinced by Yeasayer's inclusion on 2009's state-of-the-alternative-union compilation Dark Was the Night.
Having garnered an audience, Yeasayer set about working on a second album that they hoped would confound their followers. “You’ve gotta not be scared to go different directions,” Tuton said. “I think a lot of artists shoot themselves in the foot. They record their first album, and that’s the way they’re introduced to the world. And, if they gain some success from the first album, there can be the feeling that they have to re-do that, they have to make that album again to live up to these expectations that people now have of them. For me, that would be my nightmare.”
Recorded over a snowy winter in upstate New York, 2010's Odd Blood, the band's second album, proved a worthy successor to All Hour Cymbals. Building upon the unique sound they'd founded, it was a more theatrical, dynamic work.
