Category: Yeasayer

Yeasayer – Odd Blood (2010)

posted by record facts

Odd Blood is the self-produced second studio album by American experimental rock band Yeasayer. Recorded in the state of New York during 2009, it was released on February 8, 2010 in Europe and a day later in North America, with Secretly Canadian as the primary label. “Ambling Alp”, “O.N.E.“, “Madder Red”, and “I Remember” were released as singles. Odd Blood peaked at number 63 on the US Billboard 200 and at number 64 on the UK Albums Chart. It reached number five on the US Billboard Independent Albums chart. Yeasayer followed the record’s release with an extended tour throughout 2010.

Odd Blood was mostly crafted with engineer Steve Revitte in a secluded cabin studio. During the sessions, Yeasayer experimented with different types of instruments and recording machines. Auxiliary musicians were hired to help with the process. The idea was to marry sonic experimentation with pop structures, while primary songwriters Chris Keating and Anand Wilder explored a variety of themes such as boxing, addiction, and paranoia. Odd Blood also contains several love songs. The album received largely positive reviews from critics. Praise centered on its cohesive merging of genres, especially the pop-influenced rhythms.

Lyrics

Yeasayer’s two main lyricists, Keating and Wilder, shared writing duties for the 10 songs on Odd Blood. Keating, whose grandfather was a boxer in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was inspired to write “Ambling Alp” after reading about American boxer Joe Louis. The track’s title comes from the nickname of one of Louis’ adversaries, Italian Primo Carnera, while the lyrics, including the lines “Stick up for yourself son / Never mind what anybody else done”, are from the perspective of Louis’ father. Keating wrote “I Remember” as a love song about a woman—later to be his wife—he met and kissed on a plane; he has noted that for the time he overcame his fear of flying. “Mondegreen” is Keating’s attempt to mix the late 1970s drug-fueled paranoia of David Bowie with the current 24-hour news cycle and “the sort of absurd, psychotic rants” of Fox newscasters Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

For his first track on Odd Blood, “Madder Red”, Wilder wrote a song in the vein of John Lennon‘s “Jealous Guy“, “about being a weak man, a gambler”. The first lines which begin with “Even when my luck is down” are borrowed from a Celtic book of verse. In “O.N.E.”, the lyricist tackled the issue of addiction, specifically alcoholism, but related it “to a way you’d get rid of a girlfriend”. According to Wilder, the subject matter of “Grizelda” is drug lord Griselda Blanco. It was written after Yeasayer watched Cocaine Cowboys, a film about the violent Miami cocaine industry. The song is a fictional account of the film’s main interviewee, a former hitman of Blanco’s, who is writing her a letter in which he is both scared and in love following her extradition to Colombia.

Composition

Odd Blood is built around sonic experimentation with different genres and synthetic musical elements. Yeasayer tried to commit to certain styles for an entire song and “not jump around”. Opener “The Children” is an electronically manipulated song created with the extensive use of subwoofers. The band members sang its harmonies through a fan and used pitch shifters and were determined to have the song as the first track, especially because Keating liked the idea of starting the album as “a departure point” from the last “very choral” song on All Hour Cymbals. Pitch shifting is also used on “Ambling Alp”, first created as an instrumental demo by Tuton. Using a Harmonic Octave Generator effects pedal, he made his arpeggiated bass guitar notes sound like a flute’s acoustic output. Keating then sampled the solo and built a song around it; his a cappella singing was recorded both conventionally in a booth and in the studio’s basement with a distant miking scheme inspired by David Bowie’s 1977 album “Heroes”.

The third track on Odd Blood, “Madder Red”, was conceived as a “quiet, folky, acoustic lullaby” by Wilder. Once the basic opening structure was in place, Keating decided to add a “heavy beat” on top, which changed the feel of the song. The vocalist created “I Remember” himself in his basement with a similar recording setup to All Hour Cymbals. Using a damaged Nord keyboard, he played “weird sounds” that were interesting together. Impressed with the track’s tone, the rest of the band decided not to amend the demo too much. A live version was first recorded before being doubled in length, a “four-and-a-half-minute-long mixtape love ballad”. “I Remember” is followed by “O.N.E.”, created when Wilder was exploring the idea of a song that included more than one chord. The guitarist played a long riff of about 16 bars with different chords before adding “a big beat” over it. The track was trialled at different festivals, after which Yeasayer decided to keep its live “funkier vibe”. For “Love Me Girl”, Wilder used loops to evoke the emotions in the final scene of the movie Trainspotting—in which a character finds a sum of money in a locker—followed by an R&B style similar to Justin Timberlake‘s. The song’s melody was created using an acoustic guitar and MIDI notes on computer program GarageBand, to which synthetic elements and a dancehall-type beat were then added.

The seventh track on Odd Blood, “Rome”, features beats taken from Moroccan and Syrian dance music that Keating’s wife had on her iPod, while for “Strange Reunions”, Yeasayer created a short song under three minutes by exploring unconventional time signatures in different parts in the style of fellow New York City band Dirty Projectors. “Mondegreen” follows and is an old song created by Keating using samplers plugged into a television set. Using four channels which showed programs like infomercials and soap operas, he recorded four banks of sound and structured a song by singing on top of the material. The last track, “Grizelda”, is, according to Tuton, “a nice way to close an album. It lulls you into sitting back in your chair, puts you in a trance a bit, although the subject matter might be a bit dark.”

Track listing

  1. The Children – 3:12
  2. Ambling Alp – 3:55
  3. Madder Red – 4:03
  4. I Remember – 4:23
  5. O.N.E. – 5:23
  6. Love Me Girl – 5:00
  7. Rome – 3:48
  8. Strange Reunions – 2:35
  9. Mondegreen – 4:37
  10. Grizelda – 2:40

All songs written and composed by Yeasayer.

Yeasayer

  • Chris Keating – vocals, keyboards
  • Anand Wilder – guitars, vocals, keyboards
  • Ira Wolf Tuton – bass guitar, backing vocals

Additional musicians

Production

  • Yeasayer – producers
  • Steve Revitte – recording, engineering
  • Britt Myers – recording, engineering, mixing
  • Jake Aron – additional engineering
  • Todd Brozman – mixing assistant
  • Jay Culliton – mixing assistant
  • Geoff Vincent – mixing assistant
  • Chris Gehringer – mastering

Design

Notes
Released: February 8, 2010
Recorded: 2009 Studio Jersville Studio (Woodstock, New York) Great City Productions (New York City, New York)
Genre: Psychedelic pop, indie pop, worldbeat, experimental rock
Length: 39:36

Label – Secretly Canadian