Live: Yeasayer

The Yeasayer gig at the Concorde was such an exciting prospect that we sent not one but two reviewers down to see what the fuss. Zac Colbert and Dom Ashton go head to head – which one will you agree with? Or more to the point which will you agree with most. It's a critic throwdown. First Zac, then Dom will follow:

Pop is evolving and thanks to a few vanguard New York artists, it’s for the better. The likes of Sleigh Bells, Jai Paul and tonight’s Yeasayer are rebranding popular music, moving it away from the highly polished aesthetics of Lady Gaga and the manufactured idols of X-Factor towards something honest, grassroots and often spectacular.

Tickets sold out a few days before this evening’s show and everyone has turned up to cram Concorde2’s main room. Yeasayer’s recent album Odd Blood has been met with critical acclaim and propelled them out of the blogosphere frying pan and into the mainstream fire.

Opener Wait for the Summer soon lulls everyone into a trance. The experimental blend of psychedelic folk pop drifts us down a neon river as frontman Chris Keating bounces around the stage with the buoyancy of a warm summer breeze. He’s dropped the woeful angst from his voice on their debut album All Hour Cymbals for a far more tuneful range that provides a new richness to the older tracks.

The crowd are engrossed by their ethereal performance, Concorde2’s stage is tented out in billowing silver sheets setting the scene in an igloo shaped spacecraft and so the majority are rendered physically unresponsive to the funky synth tracks like Rome but by the end of the set Mondegreen’s coxed everyone into grooving.

They tease us with an encore that was always coming as its Ambling Alp, a tune which is anything but ambling. It’s got the assurance that many tracks on their debut album lacked. The lyrics referring to Italian boxer Primo Carnera, “Stick up for yourself son, never mind what anyone else done” resonates the newfound confidence in their frontman and garners a sing-a-long from the gawping crowd.

We’ve all stood hypnotised without the band directly engaging with us, Chris Keating rarely spoke between tracks as they tended to bleed into each other. Yeasayer put on an absolutely captivating show but they did it at arms length.

Words By Zac Colbert

Yeasayer last visited Brighton back in February on the closing night of their tour and, to be perfectly honest, they gave the impression that they were in desperate need of some sleep. Despite a slow start, this time around Yeasayer gave a more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed performance. To avoid any confusion though, let’s deal with things chronologically and start with the support band, Clock Opera.

It’s always interesting to see how bands with songs that are heavily reliant on studio trickery translate them into a live performance. Happily, Clock Opera seem to have found ways to engage the audience without sacrificing their sound.  On new single ‘A Piece of String’, the band bashed out rhythms on old beer tankards while the backing track played the chopped up main theme; it’s a nice touch, typical of a band striving to be more inventive than most. At times they were reminiscent of TV On The Radio and perhaps there were even flashes of the band who were tonight’s main event.

Yeasayer took to a stage so festooned with luminous drapes and pulsating floor lamps it resembled some sort of futuristic Turkish bordello. Failing to kick off with a big tune to stir the crowd out of its Monday evening slumber, they seemed content to let things build up slowly. The first rumblings of movement in the audience sparked when they played‘Rome’a few songs in, but it was only in the later stages of proceedings, when we are treated to ‘O.N.E’, ‘Madder Red’ and ‘Ambling Alp’, that the assembled masses really started throwing themselves around a little.

While it would be wrong to describe the gig as anything other than a success, we left wondering how the night could have turned out if they had got everyone’s pulses racing a little earlier.

Words By Dom Ashton
Photos By Mike Burnell, Kate Telfer

Yeasayer
Concorde2
12th July 2010