0 Yeasayer's "Odd Blood"

I personally have been eagerly waiting a long time for some news about Yeasayer’s next record. The Brooklyn experimentalist who describe their own music as “Middle Eastern-psych-snap gospel”, have finally announced some information regarding their long awaited sophomore release. The follow up to 2007’s amazing and utterly original “All Hour Cymbals” will be called “Odd Blood”, and will be released February 9th, 2010 via Secretly Canadian. Yeah, I guess they really haven’t given us much to go on except the title and tracklisting, but it’s a start and I’m already salivating.

I caught Yeasayer for the first time at a show at Neumos in 2008. This show opened my eyes and ears to a couple new discoveries, one of them being Yeasayer. To some this might also be known as the night I died a little inside, because up until around mid 2007, I was pretty much fully engulfed it all things metal. Metal was my life; metal shows, metal t-shirts, metal vinyl, metal, black, metal, horns, black, metal, horns. For 4 years I had pretty much exclusively attended metal shows, and I lived at Seattle venues like Studio Seven and El Corazon. The show on January 31st, 2008, was actually in hindsight a pretty amazing billing and clearly not metal. Howlin’ Rain which features Ethan Miller from Comets on Fire, a pre-superstardom MGMT, Yeasayer, and the band I actually went to see Black Mountain, whose heavy moments tickled my metal funny bone at the time, all graced the stage that night.

I remember a conversation I had at the show in which myself and a few others around me were in complete agreement that this more or less unknown named Yeasayer, that we just discovered and were blown away by, were something very special. They are a band that is like nothing I have heard before, meticulously layering middle eastern influences, pop, gospel, electronic, and rock into some mind blowing frankensteinian orchestration. Watch the videos below of some of the new stuff and tell me these aren’t musical mad scientists at work. I have seen Yeasayer 3 times now; at Neumos in January of 2008, on the main stage at Sasquatch 2008, and then again at Neumos in November of 2008 for a headlining gig, and I implore you to give them a spin.

Track List for “Odd Blood”:

1 "The Children"
2 "Ambling Alp"
3 "Madder Red"
4 "I Remember"
5 "O.N.E."
6 "Love Me Girl"
7 "Rome"
8 "Strange Reunions"
9 "Mondegreen"
10 "Grizelda"