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Yeasayer
"Odd Blood"
3 stars
If their 2007 album, "All Hour Cymbals," was Yeasayer teetering on the edge of psychedelia, then "Odd Blood" is their leap into its deepest depths. Here's the question: Is it a safe landing, or a hard, messy splat?
We hear the answer triumphantly in the album's lead single, "Ambling Alp." It's a self-help song ("You must stick up for yourself son / Never mind what anybody else done") egged on by defiant synth claps, a swamp of bellowing frog-mating calls and tinkling wooden percussion.
Unfortunately, this may be the album's only soaring moment before it plunges into confusion.
The most diluted member of the band appears to be lead vocalist Chris Keating, who does everything from letting Auto-Tune control his vocals on the bridge of "Ambling Alp" to channeling Elvis Presley on "Rome." Though he was a versatile vocalist on the band's previous album, Keating seems to be trying way too hard to rebut some critics' assertions that his vocals are the weakest part of Yeasayer. As he mimics others' voices or hides behind technology, you can sense his insecurity; the vocals sound strained, or even afraid.
Ushering in the second half of the album, "Love Me Girl" may be the point at which all the members get lost. It begins with whirring spaceships, over-driven, syncopated keyboards slathered in reverb and pitched vocalizations doing everything from screaming at you to talking in some incomprehensible language. Suddenly, it all stops; Keating comes in, at first confused about why his lover would lie to him, then asking her not to give up on him. With all the jumbled water birds and howler monkeys accompanying his vocals and the all-too-creepy way he says "love me girl" at the chorus, it's hard to blame her for not loving him. We kind of wish he would go away too.
The album's creepiness continues all the way to the end with "Grizelda." On this track, Keating claims that when we sleep, a voice in someone else's head tells him to kill people. The woozy reverb and haunted piano building and twirling around him makes the track feel like a dream, which is comforting. By the end of this album, it feels really good to wake up, shake it off and go about your day as if nothing happened.
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