Yeasayer’s album "Amen & Goodbye" releases one week from this Friday, and the singles they've already released thus far have been real treats. “Silly Me” is a very, very poppy echo of the whimsy on 2010’s “Odd Blood.” “I Am Chemistry” sounds like it could have been both the lead single and best track of 2013’s “Fragrant World.” Lastly, “Prophecy Gun” feels right at home among the jam tracks of their first album. More importantly, all three tracks really build on the niches Yeasayer has chiseled out over the years.
Chris Keating’s passionate vocals, Anand Wilder’s trinity of vocals, synths and guitar, and Ira Wolf Tuton’s absolute, unparalleled mastery of the bass and falsetto form the backbone of Yeasayer. 2007’s “All Hour Cymbals,” Yeasayer’s first album, was an incredibly solid debut, a diverse, psychedelic flux of sleepy desert folk such as the sweeping finisher “Red Cave” and “Worms” and very spicy pop singles: “2080” and the opening track “Sunrise.” I come back again and again to their live performances from this era, especially their performances on Jools Holland. There’s a moment in “2080” where they show Frightened Rabbit in the audience and every band member is wearing an expression that just screams, “We have to follow that?”
“Odd Blood” (2010), heralded by a friend of mine as the “golden age” of Yeasayer, was not only turning a new page for the band but opening a whole new book. Replacing their drummer with two percussionists, the band’s sound evolved into something much more heightened and obtuse. It was a logical progression, however, just look at the track “O.N.E.” In 2011 a year after the album's release, the band (minus Keating) performed the track's original incarnation on an Australian radio station. Instead of the cyber-nightclub breakup jam of the album version, Wilder let loose with a somber, folky dirge for an emptying relationship, something that would have nestled perfectly within "All Hour Cymbals." The rest of "Odd Blood" is similar -- somber reality hidden deep within a bright, eclectic mayhem. The album's a sanctuary, to say the least; the song "Ambling Alp" really kept me going through most of high school.
"Fragrant World" was a step into the strange for the band and the advent of their current drummer Cale Parks. Highly electronic, disjointed and as minimal as it was experimental, the album was a bit of a standstill for critics who couldn't quite figure out what to do with it and was difficult to access for newer listeners. Still peppered with the occasional pop single -- "Devil and the Deed," "Longevity" and "Damaged Goods"-- but stumbling to find something solid to stand on (which, oddly, was at least to me the album's whole point), "Fragrant World"'s stranger places were where it triumphed: the outro of "Henrietta," the abrasiveness of the opening track, and the dreamy nothingness of "Glass of the Microscope."
The band's sound has not only coalesced into something both compelling on its own but also is a force capable of drawing on and inventing forward from its past successes. This new album is going to be something magical, and if it’s their last, then I’m going to be oh so sad.
