Yeasayer "All Hour Cymbals" Sounds like: Beach Boys meet Animal Collective
Yeasayer has become the biggest indie sensation since whatever the last indie sensation was. Fortunately, the Brooklyn band's debut album "All Hour Cymbals" meets the hype. Complex, yet accessible, Yeasayer's sound has an air of vague familiarity, though few will be able to pin down exactly what it is.
While other bands have tried to mix world and folk sounds, Yeasayer incorporates basic song structure. Essentially, they prove that having a beginning, middle and end can do wonders. But while the individual songs on "All Hour" are satisfying - and jams like "Wait for the Wintertime" are just that - these Brooklyn hipsters have overcome the age of iTunes and proven that some albums are worth listening to, from start to finish. Every song is only made better by the music before and after it.
"All Hour Cymbals" is a pretty good representation of the state of the world right now. It taps into different cultures in exciting new ways, yet all at once succumbs to periods of momentary paranoia. All this is best articulated on the third track "2080," in which lead Chris Keating sings, "I can't sleep when I think about the future I was born into."
From the opener "Sunrise" to the closer "Red Caves," these young Brooklynites tap into the youth of today as they try to make sense of a world where nothing seems permanent. This is the album for which you came to college.
-DAVID GROSSMAN
