TALES OF LOHR: YARD ACT'S "WHERE'S MY UTOPIA?"
On the latest from a new force in British rock; plus, "This Week in Warhol" is out (of Africa)
One of the more idiosyncratic things I genuinely miss about my decade-plus of residence in L.A. is the constant possibility of aesthetic discovery that was baked into the cake of my daily time behind the wheel. Like the vast majority of Angelenos, my life there always involved a great deal of driving, which means that, when I wasn’t playing CDs or audiobooks on my car’s disc drive, I spent a lot of time every week listening to the radio. Shuffling through the broad array of diverse, skillfully curated terrestrial stations on offer in the greater Los Angeles area (I never took the satellite plunge), I would inevitably encounter tracks and artists entirely unfamiliar to me that would end up becoming serious favorites and, once my listening eventually migrated largely to Tidal, playlist regulars. The most consistent source of fresh, invigorating sounds to be heard then on the L.A. airwaves was Morning Becomes Eclectic, the 9 a.m. to noon program on KCRW, 89.9 FM, broadcasting out of Santa Monica College. Hosted during the lion’s share of my West Coast tenure by the impeccable Jason Bentley (he vacated the host’s chair in 2019), the program served as my introduction to, among other now-cherished-by-me artists, the exploratory neo-soul vocalist Niia and the bold electro-R&B beatmaster and multi-instrumentalist DaM-FunK. (I would eventually enjoy both these artists live at KCRW-sponsored free summer concerts at L.A.’s Hammer Museum.)
Now, my transportation is mostly public, my out-and-about listening generally Tidal-provided. However, that for-old-time’s-sake spirit occasionally drives me to stream KCRW online while out on a walk or running errands, and a few new gems still sometimes leap out to surprise me and send me in pursuit of my latest newfound fave. Not too long back, my ear was captivated by “100% Endurance,” a quirky-catchy bass-driven single by Yard Act, a four-piece alternative rock quartet from Leeds in the Yorkshire area in the north of England. The song’s loose-limbed rhythms, interpolations of splintery yet joyous electric guitar, and thickly accented vocals intoning near-spoken philosophies alternately downtrodden and hopeful (“It’s all so pointless / It is, and that’s beautiful / I find it humbling, sincerely”) left me humming with curiosity to learn more about this band and their highly intriguing sound. I largely enjoyed their 2022 debut LP The Overload, though nothing else hooked me quite like that album-closing track that had first seized my attention. Yard Act is now back with their follow-up full-length release, and happily, Where’s My Utopia? (Universal) is a more wholly satisfying affair, a cohesive and energetic 11-song opus synthesizing surprising dance-ready grooves, bracing touches of orchestral instrumentation, and more lyrics that wed bittersweet northern-English textures with Romantic-poet sincerity and just a touch of seemingly well-earned nihilism.
The album kicks off on an appealingly wonky note with the skittery elegance of “An Illusion.” Jay Russell’s drums are an anxiously busy force pushing the music forward, while electronic distortions combine with increasingly emphatic backing vocals to underscore lead singer James Smith’s goofy hard-luck lamentations. Smith intones the album’s titular phrase amidst his ramblings, and the entire sound of disintegrating celebration cements, right from the jump, the album’s themes of regret for mistakes made and remembrance of good times that, upon closer consideration, maybe weren’t as wonderful as they at first appeared. Russell and the gritty guitar wallop of Sam Shipstone power the appropriately grating “Down by the Stream,” a painful apology to a childhood bully’s target: Smith entreats that “I was young, but moreso, I was wrong,” and attributes his youthful aggressions to the impulse of “my inner ape bearing its teeth.” This cut involves reminiscences of a trip to the English coastal resort town of Blackpool, which once again dominates the reflective reverie of the seven-and-a-half-minute “Blackpool Illuminations.” Here, a seemingly candid recollection of a mid-’90s family trip, backed by Shipstone’s nostalgic guitar figures and Russell’s powerful pops and snaps, grows ever more musical as the narrator’s digressive tale soon locks into the rhythmic pocket and becomes a proper banger-in-waiting, melancholy conjurings and all.
Yard Act’s blend of working-class kitchen-sink struggle with more vividly visceral pop-commercial sensibilities provides a few of the album’s kickiest high points. The title-says-it-all “We Make Hits” gives bass guitarist Ryan Needham a chance to seize the sonic spotlight with a vengeance, his indomitable lines crafting a thrilling dancehall-ready ride where Smith celebrates the band’s willingness to wax crowd-pleasers, a “singular ambition most musicians of our ilk aren’t willing to admit.” Needham and Russell are again the hard-grooving galvanizing factor of “Dream Job,” a tune seemingly ready made for letting your hair down on the floor after a long week busting your ass at the eponymous fantasy gig. The mid-song break on the Needham-centric “The Undertow” incorporates elegant violin and viola figures that almost evoke the darker cuts from the extended James Bond title-tune songbook. Guest vocalist Katy J. Pearson lends her muscular high energy to the Shipstone-fuzzy chorus of “When the Laughter Stops,” a beat-heavy bash that nevertheless manages to find plenty of space for the band’s brand of rugged clear-eyed realism: “Don’t let no one ever know about the burden that you’re smugglin’ / You dry your eyes, they’re the key to hide the strugglin’.”
It’s that ever-present willingness to confront the pain from which more frivolous pop and rock music offers naught but escape that makes Yard Act’s songs so distinctive. Sometimes that tension is made most purely manifest in the music itself, as in the rough aural textures of “Fizzy Fish,” which finds Shipstone at his harshest and most occasionally atonal and Smith’s voice intermittently broken by waves of reverb and electronic distortion. Sometimes it’s there in the singular combination of vocal content and musical presentation, as in the mid-song descending repetitions of “If I knew how to control it” that mark the brooding yet rubbery-basslined “Petroleum.” And sometimes, Yard Act serves that depression stew to you straight, most strikingly on “Grifter’s Grief,” building from the squalling saxophone and sparkly keyboards of guest artist Christopher Duffin to an frantic guitar-heavy cacophony that collapses into near-apocalyptic climactic noise.
Yard Act seems to ultimately accept the futility of so much of the transcendence towards which the bulk of contemporary pop songcraft strives. Indeed, the penultimate “Blackpool Illuminations” winds down with Smith wearily conceding that, album title’s insistent demand aside, “I know now I’m never gonna get my utopia.” But even with this tragic self-realization, the band still has one final card to play, in the casually cool, smooth-beat “A Vineyard for the North.” It’s a song that finds its own space for Smith’s unsparing imagery and illusion-free extemporizing (“I look awkward when I’m walking forward / Even when I’m not”), but when that groove really kicks in, bounced along by the vigor of Russell’s piano, this song evokes the finest Britpop anthems of earlier decades, while still carving its own distinctive initials into the current edifice of present-day international rock music.
Yard Act is a band with the kind of prickly, difficult-to-confine sound that might have made it all too easy for them to fly under my personal radar. (They are…dare I resort to the pun…eclectic?) But the programming eccentricities of KCRW, combined with my own willingness to take the road less listened to, brought them to my grateful attention, and I’m now perfectly willing to call Where’s My Utopia? the best album I’ve yet encountered in this still relatively new musical year. So, as with my most recent piece on the new EP by Chicago hardcore outfit We’re Not Invited, consider this me most emphatically inviting you to bend an ear to the unfamiliar artist, the unexplored genre, the album that just calls to you, for whatever aesthetic or personal reasons it does so. You never know what sort of thrilling, wonderful act, yard-related or otherwise, might become a newly minted fave.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
MARCH 7, 1986
In the midst of what is, for Andy Warhol, a fairly uneventful week, the Pop artist travels to the Greenwich Theater in the Village for a screening of Sydney Pollack’s Hollywood epic Out of Africa. Inspired by the life and writings of author Isak Dinesen, the film, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, has been one of the big holiday-season releases of the previous December, and is nominated for a whopping 11 Oscars at the upcoming ceremony scheduled for March 24.
The film is a box-office hit (it ultimately becomes the fifth-highest grossing film released in 1985) and has been generally well-received by critics. But in today’s entry in his posthumously published Diaries, Warhol is far more lukewarm on the film. Warhol, the man who has directed films like the five-and-a-half-hour long Sleep and the eight-hours-and-change epic of ennui Empire, amusingly criticizes Out of Africa as “another one of those movies where nothing happens.” He bluntly cites the film’s short-by-Warholian-standards 150-minute runtime as if the mere fact of its length constitutes a criticism, and summarizes the plot thusly: “…they do this and then they do that and then they do this and then they do that, but there’s no action.” The Best Picture Academy Award front-runner is dismissed by Warhol with a mere two sentences.
Out of Africa does indeed win Best Picture at the Oscar ceremony on the 24th, the crown jewel of a tally that includes seven statuettes in total, including recognition for Pollack’s direction and for Kurt Luedtke’s screenplay in which, according to a man who makes movies in which nothing happens, nothing happens. Amusingly, however, with the passage of time, the critical consensus on the film has shifted to a stance perhaps even harsher than Warhol’s earlier takedown; today, Out of Africa is frequently cited in internet “listicles” among the worst films ever to be awarded the Best Picture Oscar. Streep will have to wait until Warhol has been dead nearly a full two years, until December 1988, to finally grace the cover of the Warhol-fronted Interview Magazine. Redford, for his part, doesn’t make the cover until 1994.
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