Yeasayer – All Hour Cymbals

Presenter

Sarah Delfante

Published

Thursday 27th March

We Are Free / Spunk

When I first loaded All Hour Cymbals into my computer iTunes faithfully queried its online database and returned the genre ‘World’. ‘What are you about iTunes?’ I thought. Despite being a record put out by Spunk a thorough listen though the album concluded iTunes may just be onto something. Who says the ‘indie’ and ‘world’ genres are mutually exclusive.

Self categorised on myspaz as Visual / Gospel / Showtunes, their byline claims them to be ‘ENYA with BOUNCE’! Add to the mix further descriptions such as ‘Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel’ (what is ‘snap’ exactly?) and claims such as on MTV.com that Yeasayer are one of seven 2007 SxSW that will matter and my head is well and truly spinning. Intrigued yet?

What you can take from all this is that All Hour Cymbals is incredibly varied and diverse and quite hard to summarise in a couple of hundred words. The more experimental and psychadelic moments are quite nice, as are some of the percussive layers and textures which continually recapture the attention throughout. Perhaps it is the more ‘gospel’ side of things that give the album an element of naffness.

Such a bizarre fusion of genres creates something quite new, unique and original which is certainly worthy of a listen – even if it just so you know what ‘Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel’ sounds like exactly. Recommending a repeat listen however… now that is more of a stretch.