Not Many Experts

As much as I enjoy being away, I can’t help coming back thanks to the promise of free music. The Christmas period is always relaxing, but there comes a time in early January when the hypem.com charts are clogged with music from everyone’s “Best Of” lists and remixes by bands that nobody has even heard of yet, and all that you can wish for is that the whole faux-religious festival would just go away so that albums can start leaking again and musicians can start twanging and banging (drums) again.

Speaking of leaking, Yeasayer’s second album, “Odd Blood”, will be in stores in early February, and you will be able to exchange bits of paper for bits of plastic then, but if you are impatient or still pretending to be poor in order to avoid your conscience, then I do believe that it is currently freely available on the internet. I would know this because, as a white middle class male, I have convinced myself that I am a poor student and have acquired said megabytes through the medium of crafty use of Google. I would very highly recommend you doing the same, as “Odd Blood” is the first great album that 2010 has offered me. Which, considering we are only a few days in, is hardly a bad deal.

I am afraid that I am far too tired to scribe out a proper review, and I also can’t help feeling that reviews are the unnecessarily formal poison that fills the NME, amongst other (much worse) publications, but that’s not to say that come the end of the year I won’t be readying myself to throw together 200 words in an effort to describe the ins and outs of this fantastic album, and why “2010 was the year that Yeasayer really came of age”, or similar pretentious identi-kit journalism. Suffice to say that if you read 2009’s “Best Of” lists and felt slightly humiliated that you hadn’t heard of many of the albums being mentioned, you need to get your illegal copy of “Odd Blood” now. Simultaneously unrestrained expression from a band who are very fleetingly on this planet and a knuckling down to more conventional aesthetics, without feeling disjointed or hypocritical, “Odd Blood” shimmers like the psychadelica of Animal Collective, but pounds like the finest parts of 80s pop. There is your sub standard journalism, now go and break the law.

Yeasayer – Madder Red

Yeasayer – One