Tangled Up In Wires

On their debut record, Yeasayer pedaled doom and dread, scoring an indie hit with their single “2080.” Now here comes the follow-up, Odd Blood, which, despite its cracked-out album art and the exceedingly creepy music video that preceeded its release, is a decidedly cheerier affair. Its also more sonically straightforward, relying on a mix of 80s synths, African rhythms, and drum machines. And, if that combination sounds more than a little familiar to you, then you’ve hit on the main problem. Odd Blood feels less like a record and more like a Cliffs Notes roll through the last few years of indie rock. Yeasayer knows what people are looking for right now, but the record never sounds like anything more than Diet Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Single “Ambling Alp” serves as a good example of where things go awry here. The song is pleasant in an in-one-ear-and-out-the-other sort of way, but its really a collection of elements that never coalesce into a whole. Here’s some MGMT dance synths and how about a little of TV on the Radio’s weird falsetto stuff. And you can’t forget the use of water samples as part of the rhythm track. There’s so much going on that, at first listen, you have to assume that it all means Something (I mean, just look at that music video) but it grows hollower and emptier the more you listen to it. Then there are the embarassingly simplistic lyrics, like “You must stick up for yourself, son/never mind what anyone else has done.” Meanwhile, the other obvious single candidate “ONE” is a break-up song that overstays its welcome and undercuts its winning slow-burn with a bloated self-importance.

Self-importance is the order of the day on Odd Blood. Everything from turgid opener “The Children” to asinine plodding of “I Remember” (an even more awkwardly direct break-up song than “ONE”) thinks it has more to say than it actually does. The scope is often comically large and painfully pretentious, almost as if Billy Corgan secretly joined Yeasayer at some point in the last year.The back half of the album is filled with songs like the laughable MJ ripoff “Rome,” complete with a silly revenge story for a plot. Even when the record is at its most danceable, like the amiably discoish “Mondegreen,” you still have to put up with some pretty hideous lyrics (“everyone make love till the morning light”). Stupid lyrics aren’t really anything new in rock and roll and they’d be excusible if Yeasayer made up for it with music that offered any sort of depth, but they do not.

Odd Blood is an overly simplistic album that seems determined to be as inoffensive as possible. It wears both its influences and contemporaries on its sleeve and seems more like something that’s been timed and callibrated to capture a certain strain of music right now – The Hives of post-Animal Collective indie. Its not that the record is hideous or unlistenable. Its just that the music fades from your memory as soon as you hear it, if you can even focus on it for that long.

Jonah’s Score: 49
Mike’s Score: 63

Tangled Up in Wires Grade: C+