Photographed for SPIN in NYC by Cass Bird
Two months before the release of Yeasayer's new album, I get a sign that the band's world has changed. I'm sitting in a jury selection room at the Brooklyn Supreme Court on a warm day in early December. An Orthodox Jewish woman is arguing with a defense lawyer about the details of the traffic accident we're being asked to consider when someone taps me on the shoulder.
"Hey, man," whispers the dude beside me. "What do you do for a living?"
I tell him what I do.
"Really?!" He asks excitedly. "Did you hear the new Yeasayer?"
By now, he and many others have heard Odd Blood, the band's second album. "The fact that people know us and are eager to hear us is completely new," says guitarist and singer Anand Wilder, sitting in a messy room at Manhattan's '50s-style Ace Hotel, one leg on the glass coffee table in front of him, the other flung over his chair's armrest. "When our first album came out, no one cared. We threw our own release party. Now, you and I are talking and the video for [first single] 'Ambling Alp' is on Kanye's blog." (Download the song here.)
The extra attention isn't the only thing that's changed; 2007's All Hour Cymbals, recorded for $5,000, was an enigmatic debut that, in its weaving together of Sacred Harp harmonies, Chimurenga rhythms, and melodic psychedelia, sounded like a Lonely Planet guide to ecstatic music. The album sold 40,000 copies in the U.S. and positioned Wilder, 27, singer-keyboardist Chris Keating, 27, bassist Ira Wolf Tuton, 30, and since-departed drummer Luke Fasano somewhere ahead of Amazing Baby and Chairlift but behind MGMT and Grizzly Bear in the ranks of Brooklyn music royalty. Odd Blood -- funkier, catchier, and, according to band manager Jason Foster, "exponentially more expensive to make" -- was designed to take them even further.
"We tried to make a poppier album," says Wilder. "I don't want to be 40 and making songs that only my girlfriend will hear."
Seconds Keating, "We wanted to sonically challenge Rihanna in the clubs. We wanted you to feel the bass in your balls."
The journey to forging this testicle-tickling low end began in 2004, when the Baltimore-bred Keating moved to New York City after a year in Chicago producing underground rappers. He promptly connected with high school friend Wilder, then working on a musical about coal miners. Tuton, whose sister is married to Wilder's cousin, joined soon after, taking time from a solid carpentry gig. ("I was in O for some work I did," says Tuton, the most earnest Yeasayer. "That magazine made me look like a tool.")
"We were trying not to rip off Joy Division and sing apathetically," says Keating of the band's origins. "Instead we said, 'Let's mix folk and electronic music and Peter Gabriel.' But we were shy about getting our music heard."
