Clap Your Hands, Say Yea

Sitting shirtless and pale in a cramped backstage dressing area, Yeasayer’s Chris Keating rolls his eyes and sighs. “Rolling Stone said a bunch of things about us that were basically untrue,” he says. “They said our new album was inspired by taking hallucinogenics in New Zealand.”

So RS made the whole thing up?
Taylor shrugs: “Well, we did take hallucinogenics. And we WERE in New Zealand at the time. But we’d already written most of the album. It certainly wasn’t inspired by that. This isn’t a drug record. We would hate for anyone to come away thinking that.”
The last we heard of Yeasayer, the bearded trio were lost in a haze of sitars, tribal drumming and chanted vocals (while there was plenty to love about their debut LP, All Our Cymbals, nobody could argue it was crying out wall to wall radio-play). They return a band transformed – new album Odd Blood is a no-holds barred pop record, ripe with glistening beats and beyond addictive melodies. With the right promotion, Keating sincerely believes it could give Rihanna a run for her money.
“Did we set out to write something catchy? Absolutely,” mods Keating, who says he is deeply honored that the single ‘Ambling Alp’ has received a thumbs-up from trend surfer supreme Kanye West on his blog. “We’ve always approached songwriting from that perspective – we set ourselves a challenge and then write about it. We want to be out there in the clubs, giving Rihanna a run for her money. Nobody wants to write music that only their loved ones get to hear. That’s not the kind of band we're interested in being. We want people to hear our shit.”
With its giggly day-glo ambience and hedonistic rush, Odd Blood has seen the Brooklynites hailed as this year’s MGMT (no matter that the real MGMT will shortly be back in action). As it so happens, this is a subject Keating is ideally placed to comment on.
“We toured with MGMT just as it was all taking off for them. From the very start, it was obvious to us that they deserved to be huge. The way we saw it was that, if there was any justice in the world, these guys would do incredibly well.”
He pauses, smiling at the memory.
“On that very first tour, we’d swap headline slots every second night. We joke now, that we could go back on tour with them, and each of us could headline Madison Square Garden on alternate nights. The problem would be that, when it was our turn, everybody would be like, ‘Who the fuck are those guys?’”
Not he says, that MGMT are quite the superstars back home that they are in the rest of the world.
“They’re big in America. Just not super big. I think they’re a much bigger deal in Europe, the UK and Australia.”
Though based in New York, three quarters of Yeasayer hail from Baltimore, aka the capital of American gun-crime. Coincidentally they went to the same school as the other critically adored psychedelic group of the moment Animal Collective, though that’s about as far as their acquaintance goes.
“I wouldn’t say we were great friends or anything back then,” says Keating. "We didn’t have sleep-overs. We did know each other.”
Some of their new material, it must be said, is a little broad. Yes, Odd Blood is a cracking record in places. However, much of it is unabashedly treacly – consider the aforementioned Kanye fave ‘Ambling Alp’, the "positive" undercurrents of which wouldn’t sound out of place on Sing-Along-With-Barney (“Stick up for yourself, son/Never mind what anybody else done.").
“It’s funny. I’d always thought of that track as a story rather than having a message for anybody," proffers Keating. “It's actually about my grandfather, who was a professional boxer in the ‘30s and ‘40s. He was English but he fought under an Irish name. He wasn’t a champion. He got to go up against some of the big names of the time though.”
The song is also in part a tribute to boxer Joe Louis, who (literally) struck an early blow against the Nazis.
“He was the first African-American guy to be regarded as a national hero in America. He defeated Schmeling [a Nazi champ] before the war.”
As it happens, Keating himself has been a keen amateur boxer but says his slight build mitigated against him.
“I’m too skinny to fight fair,” he laughs. “I’d throw a sucker shot.”