‘It appears I have become rich.’ James Smith repeats these words like an incantation on a standout track from Yard Act’s lean, bracing debut album, The Overload, as if shrewdly anticipating the tide of hype soon to sweep the band away. So what are they to do now that prophecy’s fulfilled itself?
Well, on follow-up Where’s My Utopia? they answer with another question. Just as the title interrogates the nature of success in a system built on keeping us just dissatisfied enough to perpetually want more, they haven’t lost their socio-political focus. They’ve just turned it towards themselves, and some big changes are evident almost from the off.
‘It’s now my great pleasure to introduce to you the greatest voice of the entire century,’ recites a compere as the record begins. This knowing joke sets up an album much heavier on introspection than their debut.
Yes, Yard Act have crashed into self-consciousness like new teenagers – The Fall meets the fall of man, if you like. ‘I was hot property once, but the promise is gone,’ Smith mutters on opener ‘An Illusion’, ‘because the roots were all rotten from the start.’
But under the supervision of Gorillaz producer Remi Kabaka Jr. their sound has turned outwards as much as the words have drawn inwards. Where The Overload dealt with the hectic onslaught of modern society in its lyrics, it’s the constantly stimulating and surprising music on Where’s My Utopia? which best shows off this thesis.
Bursting with playful ideas, the tunes are bigger, baggier, and a lot more ambitious and eclectic than on the record’s predecessor. ‘An Illusion’ alone flickers between ska-style syncopation, psychedelic flute samples, and moody guitar to reflect our singer’s crisis of self.
Yet here there is as much defiance as there is doubt. The ecstatically bratty dance-punk stylings of ‘We Make Hits’ see ver Act batting away potential criticism of their poptastic new direction without a sliver of apology. ‘I’m still an anti-C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T,’ Smith declaims, ‘it just so happens that there’s other things I happen to be’. Mentions of LCD Soundsystem are ten a penny whenever a talky young rock band switch on their synths, but the audience-baiting wit of ‘We Make Hits’ earns that comparison down to the title.
Mind you, some may find our frontman’s sleepy, sarky, spoddy drawl to be a more endearing Mark E. Smith impression than James Murphy’s cantankerous Snagglepuss sprechgesang. This is especially so on ‘Down By The Stream’, a rumination on childhood bullying set to a barndance-hip hop hybrid, and ‘Blackpool Illuminations’, a tender, slow-burning Afrobeat-backed monologue about the beauty of fatherhood.
Both tracks take sharp turns from dry humour into disarming confessionalism and sentimentality, unexpected oases of lyrical earnestness shining through thick tangles of joke-packed, rambling storytelling. When Smith admits ‘I attained perfection with you’ at the cathartic climax to ‘Blackpool Illuminations’, it’s the most emotionally direct moment on an already starkly honest record.
If this has the potential to be a bit too sweet, it’s pleasingly salted by Smith’s monotone. He deadpans every line in the voice of a man who just wants to read a book in peace, and if anything, his delivery is flattest in the album’s most poignant moments – the vocal version of avoiding eye contact, to strikingly moving effect.
These monologues show off Smith’s greatest skill, his wit and dexterity leaping forward to match the new complexity of the tunes. Take ‘Fizzy Fish’. The intensity of his ennui-soaked poetry finds an anchor in the backing’s lumbering, full-volume rock, whether he’s yapping ‘d’you remember fizzy fish?’ like an angry Peter Kay parody or sardonically bleating ‘I’m weird, me. Dead weird’.
More impressive still is ‘Grifter’s Grief’. Kabaka’s history with Gorillaz comes to the fore as he folds grungy bass into hypnotic electropop. The deft lyrics bounce over the top like a skimmed stone until the whole thing explodes in a torrent of screaming noise. Similarly, down-and-dirty rocker ‘Petroleum’ gives way to a breakbeat-metal frenzy which would make the Beastie Boys raise their eyebrows.
Still, as ‘We Make Hits’ decrees, Where’s My Utopia? impressively showcases Yard Act’s new talent for hooky accessibility. They’re scarcely recognisable as the same band on angst-wracked ballad ‘The Undertow’. Galloping through cinematic strings towards a disco-infused peak, it could be their very own Bond theme.
It’s lead single ‘Dream Job’ which stands as the album’s highlight, an ironic office-party ruckus whipped up in two-and-a-half minutes and likely the catchiest thing they’ve ever done. The press release compares the song to ‘The Blockheads doing “Club Tropicana”’, while the band cite Spiller’s turn-of-the-millennium house classic ‘Groovejet’ as an influence.
But between its squiggling, funky melody lines and hectic crowd-shout chorus, most of all ‘Dream Job’ recalls their fellow Yorkshiremen Heaven 17, a band who satirised sharp-elbowed Thatcherism in splashy new wave style. You’ll be bowling your swivel chair across the room and swinging from the lighting fixture before you know it. Play to win!
In keeping with the Hollywood-flavoured preoccupations of ‘When The Laughter Stops’, which sees David Thewlis delivering an excerpt from Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ soliloquy, the album’s closer serves up a happy ending after the darkest point. ‘A Vineyard for the North’ is pitched somewhere between half-smiling resignation and beaming joy, as Smith’s lyrics arrive at a dream of Arcadian retirement.
All hands-in-the-air house tropes and ringing pianos, it resembles something Hot Chip might have cooked up on 2010’s One Life Stand if they were a more garrulous lot. No matter where you’re listening, it’s hard to avoid at least a little dance of delight.
Where’s My Utopia? is a record about its own existence, but the question in its title is one which so many of us have asked ourselves. In trying to answer it, Yard Act have created something which dazzles in its intelligence, epic musical sprawl, and sense of fun.
Far from making a move into cold experimentalism, they’ve also found the means to express themselves with much greater honesty and warmth while reaching generously out to a broader audience than ever before. What more could you ask for in a second album than that?
Where’s My Utopia? is released on Friday 1st March through Island Records – pre-order via these links
Find out more about Yard Act on their official website
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Phoebe Fox
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