The Yummy Fur – Everybody Talks About the Weather (Upset The Rhythm) – Now wisdom says, or maybe it was Top Banana who said it? Or maybe Top Banana’s best friend? Or Pavlov’s perfect lapdog? Whoever said it said something about most bands having a shelf life and that the best ones know to jump off that shelf well before that sell by date destroys the magic. Most bands go on way too long, most bands should not return. The Yummy Fur are not most bands and there’s more bananas and no one needs to be on any kind of witch hunt here. Back there in the last century when Organ was still a rather handmade thing, the Yummy Fur were one of those vital indie edgy type art-rockish fanzine-fuelling DIY bands putting out brilliantly cool seven inch singles in great looking artwork and hang on, let’s let the record label tell it, let’s let their new label give us the details in terms of what’s going on and hello, here’s the right here and now of it all…
“The Yummy Fur’s first album of new material in over 27 years is seductive and ambiguous; a fast-paced flip through scenes from art, myth, life and fantasy; a witty whole made from glittering scraps. The band’s original incarnation – fronted by singer, songwriter and guitarist John McKeown from 1992 to 1999 – morphed from making quick-hit cartoon-art songs to Eno and Cale-influenced creepers, populated by characters from McKeown’s life in Glasgow and the films, books and poetry that he lived a parallel life through. Everybody Talks About The Weather delights in using every past iteration of the band as potent collage material: a melee of sounds and ideas existing at once, revealing themselves then dipping back into hiding. Recorded by the original core trio of McKeown, Brian MacDougall (guitar) and Paul Thomson (drums), Everybody Talks About The Weather comes 17 years after the band reformed for sporadic live shows, and seven years after the release of their sorta-greatest hits compilation Piggy Wings (Rock Action). Ten tracks long with nothing to spare, it is as condensed and vital as their best songs, with a new clarity of sound that allows their ambiguities to come into the light….”
This is electric, this is indeed vital, this is fast forward condensed and good, this is in the middle of something you’ll want to be in the middle of, this is still very much The Yummy Fur but but but is there (even) more to it and them this time? They’re nailing it out there, they’ve probably got a picture of everyone of us on their bathroom wall. hitting on us one at a time and listening to the very first things that’s to be found in our collective heads. Every bit of this album is lean and vital; lyrics that demand you try to keep up with wherever they’re going (oe what they might have been reading) and hello, hello, hello. This is everything you would hope for from a new Yummy Fir album: you hoped they would do it, that you wouldn’t have to be polite about their attempt to recapture it, that you wouldn’t have to just be polite while everyone runs through the heather talking about the weather. Let’s talk about the weather (’till we’re alone together, turn of your wireless, your TV and your radio, nobody will suspect) and painting tartan tigers or flying in tug boats and turning out the late and fast forward to where while we’re watching German bombs raining down on Spain? Won’t you fetch me the head of Alfredo Garcia while I figure out the way the words in this review should flow, his head is over there on the shelf in the hall by the chair and headphones, oh yeah. And then I woke up and said to myself what are you doing here writing about the same band you were writing about thirty years ago? Well right now I’m waiting for that television red paint to dry and that Californian blue to do the same then I can get back to what I’m really doing rather banging out words about the words of these rather yummy furs and the king of nothing and semolina ballerinas and tartan Modigliani or maybe Piet Mondrian and whatever the weather and we’ve not heard anything like a bad song on here yet. No drop off, everyone’s a winner and on their heads there sits a crown and say hello to every word and every note. there isn’t a bad one on this very (very) pleasing album. You’ll love the three minutes and forty-three seconds of Say Hello, it will instantly demand you climb back on and ride it all again and wake up Diana and the neighbours and everything in the English garden and more bananas (and there are lots on Bananas). I don’t have a car so I can’t say I wrote this in the car while you were on a sunbed and yes, too much compression on everyone’s album and here comes another tuneworm, everyone needs a little help on the way.
I’m pretty sure no one reads reviews these days, I know for sure that no one read that one from the other day that I’m copping all the online grief for, all the grief reads like no one actually read any of it and who needs reviews, I assume you cut to the chase and started listening to the album and gave up on all this ages ago and is Say Hello the best pop song in years? A melody that will be far more than a memory in the morning, tell them that you need this, tell them this will help along the way…
The Yummy Fur just made a very fine, deliciously engaging, beautifully beguiling, charming, attractive, biting and tempting, instinctive wordplay, well read, sometimes deceptive or hiding a trick, pop-laced indie art rock that demands you pay attention and in doing so appreciates that you, as the listener might just have a clue and that you don’t always need it dumb, throwaway and compressed to hell (excellent cover art again, The Yummy Fur always had excellent artwork, the work of Mac McNaughton) An excellent return… (sw)
The album is released in September, we;ve gone a bit early, sorry. Here’s the Bandcamp or www.upsettherhythm.co.uk
Previously…
THE ORGAN 