Oh Yea, Can You See?

Yeasayer ply hazy nu-gazer rock, strafed with ‘60s-referencing harmonies and enough world music flourishes to send David Byrne into a girlish swoon. Beneath their dreamy noize-drifts, however, lurks a dark – nay terrible – secret.

“Enya has that one track called ‘Orinoco Flow’,” deadpans frontman Anand Wilder. “I think it’s pretty much perfect. She’s something of an influence for us.”
He isn’t joking.
“We’re pretty sincere in our devotion to Enya. There’s a lot to her music that is exactly what we are going for in terms of atmosphere and production qualities. I think there are just a few things missing that make her kind of cheesy or unacceptable to people. We’re on a mission to amend those failures on her part.”
The blognoscenti have had these Brooklyn-dwellers on their radars for months now. But it took a turn on Late Night... With Conan O’Brien to bring them to the attention of the mainstream.
“Conan O’Brien was kind of a whirlwind thing,” Wilder recalls. “We’d come off a month long tour – we were told half-way through that we might get the slot. We didn’t want to jinx it by telling any of our family or friends. We knew the rug could be pulled from under us at any moment. When it happened it was over so quickly that we didn’t really have enough time to get nervous or appreciate the situation. We were pretty psyched when Conan said our song was the best thing he’d heard all year.”
Listening to debut album All Hour Cymbals, you may wonder what Yeasayer have been slipping into their Kool Aid. Treated sitars bleed into swirling banks of anti-noise while, deep in the mix, an eerie falsetto rises and falls.
“I think it’s a rejection of the boring two guitar rock that was coming out of the indie world in the early 2000s,” says Anand of their sound, dubbed ‘nu eccentric’ by the music press. “It’s a rejection of Lower East Side cool. Also, a lot of people have gotten more exposure to music from around the world. With the internet it’s just very easy to open yourself to different influences. We’re not afraid to write a song that sounds like Electric Light Orchestra or Fleetwood Mac.”
Though NYC-based, all four members of the band hail from Baltimore, the murder capital of America and the city that inspired cult crime drama The Wire.
“To me The Wire is one of the outstanding pieces of art of the past quarter-century,” says Wilder. “But it’s not the Baltimore that we grew up in. Like most American cities, it’s a place of haves and have-nots. We all lived in nice middle-class neighborhoods. But drive 20 minutes down the road and you were in another world.”