First published in the Brighton Source
Pop is evolving and thanks to a few vanguard New York artists, it’s for the better. The likes of Sleigh Bells, Jai Paul and tonight’s Yeasayer are rebranding popular music, moving it away from the highly polished aesthetics of Lady Gaga and the manufactured idols of X-Factor towards something honest, grassroots and often spectacular.
Tickets sold out a few days before this evening’s show and everyone has turned up to cram Concorde2’s main room. Yeasayer’s recent album Odd Blood has been met with critical acclaim and propelled them out of the blogosphere frying pan and into the mainstream fire.
Opener Wait for the Summer soon lulls everyone into a trance. The experimental blend of psychedelic folk pop drifts us down a neon river as frontman Chris Keating bounces around the stage with the buoyancy of a warm summer breeze. He’s dropped the woeful angst from his voice on their debut album All Hour Cymbals for a far more tuneful range that provides a new richness to the older tracks.
The crowd are engrossed by their ethereal performance, Concorde2’s stage is tented out in billowing silver sheets setting the scene in an igloo shaped spacecraft and so the majority are rendered physically unresponsive to the funky synth tracks like Rome but by the end of the set Mondegreen’s coxed everyone into grooving.
They tease us with an encore that was always coming as its Ambling Alp, a tune which is anything but ambling. It’s got the assurance that many tracks on their debut album lacked. The lyrics referring to Italian boxer Primo Carnera, “Stick up for yourself son, never mind what anyone else done” resonates the newfound confidence in their frontman and garners a sing-a-long from the gawping crowd.
We’ve all stood hypnotised without the band directly engaging with us, Chris Keating rarely spoke between tracks as they tended to bleed into each other. Yeasayer put on an absolutely captivating show but they did it at arms length.
