Formed in: 2005, 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.
“What we’re setting out to do, [is] not back ourselves into a corner," said bassist Ira Wolf Tuton. "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.”
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, and though they looked up to them, the pair's 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."
After heading their separate ways for college (Keating in Rhode Island, Wilder in Pennsylvania), the pair reunited in New York, oncemore inspired by their fellow Park School alumni. "When I saw [Animal Collective] become successful touring musicians," said 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."
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.
Beginnings
“One of our very first practices," Wilder would recount, "me and Chris sat down and came up with the structure of 'Sunrise.' 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 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.”
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.”
Breakout
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 dynamic, instantly-accessible work indebted to dance and electronic music, with lyrics far more straight-ahead.
"We tried to branch out and do something different," Keating explained. "In our case, that was doing something more traditional, so there was a certain effort to maybe write some love songs. To us, it seemed exotic to go that route."
2012's Fragrant World found Yeasayer progressing farther down the synth-pop path, coming upon a place in the eerie, electronic wasteland "weirder and darker" than their previous records.
