Yeasayer’s sophomore album Odd Blood is deceptive. The first song, “The Children,” is a pretentiously experimental jumble of robotic noises and creepy, boogeyman vocals. However, the severe anxiety produced by the album’s opening subsides and it’s easy to get lost in the second song. “Ampling Alp” is a fatherly heart-to-heart set to a reggae beat. From there on, the album unravels as an opus that is delightfully cacophonous and intensely enjoyable.
The sound of Odd Blood is heavily influenced by Eighties pop, circa “Tainted Love” — possibly due to the fact that the band hired Peter Gabriel’s old drummer, Jerry Marotta, and recorded most of the album at his home in Woodstock, NY. The Middle Eastern influences established in Yeasayer’s first album, All Hour Cymbals, shine through as well. The combination of these two ostensibly different sounds is flawless; the spacey synthesizer mixed Middle Eastern grooves, heard most noticeably in the song “Rome,” just make sense. The songs are complex and original, with the exception of the album’s sixth track, “Love Me Girl,” which sounds like it came straight from Flight of the Conchords.
Odd Blood definitely qualifies Yeasayer as key players in the Brooklyn-based digital reinvention of rock music, right up there with the likes of Animal Collective. The album is sharp, conceptual and beyond a doubt intellectual. And did we mention that the band’s guitarist, Anand Wilder, went to Penn?
Odd Blood 4 Stars
