Yeasayer - Odd Blood

Every so often, if I have nothing else to freak out about, I let myself be taken in by the hype. Hype rarely gets lived up to. But at the end of the day, you the listener can either come across something interesting or at the very least, keep your name in the hipster circles. By the way, it's completely UNhip to admit that you do any work to keep hip. So keep that on the DL.

But hipsters the world over are doing their little fun trick of calling this the album of the year, when of course, it's only February. They did the same thing with Animal Collective in 2009, and to give the scenesters some credit, at least they kept with it at the end of the year. Now, I for one, was bored to bleeding tears with Animal Collective, so I went into this with maybe a little prejudice.

But I came out on a rational end of it. Odd Blood is a good collection of songs. People are going to tell you it's "great", and I won't fight about that. The album starts the mixture with the correct basic ingredient: the pop hook. You can tell that Yeasayer wrote some songs first on piano, on guitar. Built a skeleton out of some melodies and some chord progressions. Good.

Next, and this is where the hipster gets involved; Yeasayer take those songs and add (*insert rare trait to set you apart quality here*) to make the songs uniquely theirs. In Yeasayer's case, that quality is polyrhythmic electronics. Odd rhythms are added, and those chords that I told you about before- they're broken up into busy electronic pieces. And it's all done in a way that's controlled enough to keep the song intact and bizarre enough to make it unique.

The record starts off well enough with "Ambling Alp", a Muse-goes-reggae inspirational song about overcoming your failures. This style of ever-changing beats over pop songs continues throughout the record, and to enjoy this all, you'll at least want to be a fan of Depeche Mode. Some, like "ONE", feels straight out of a 1985 British electronic documentary. Other times, the Yeas get completely no-dimensional and experimental in a way that works ("Mondegreen").

My favorite track is detailed below, give it a listen. Just from the electronic-popness of the album is going to keep a rocker like me from keeping this in rotation. But like I said, I won't argue with the "great" taggers. (3 of 5 stars)

Strange Reunions - Yeasayer