Yeasayer: Erotic Reruns

Keating, Tuton, and Anand Wilder avoid that pretension through union of Erotic Reruns’ dual identity as swinging multi-genre rock—a bit of folk here (“Blue Skies Dandelions”), a dash of R&B over there (“I’ll Kiss You Tonight”), synth-heavy pop overlaying the whole thing (“Ecstatic Baby,” “Ohm Death,” “Crack A Smile”)—and roiling, cheeky political frustration. Their subtlety, more accurately their nuance, is welcome and even commendable. Another band might have smashed the pedal to the floor with “24-Hour Hateful Live!” and just made that the album: Here, Keating dubs unctuous senior policy advisor Stephen Miller a child killer and calls press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders a propagandist, all while counting down the nuclear clock to the fleet-footed funk of bassist Ira Wolf Tuton’s G&L fretless. Miller and Sanders make cameo appearances here, figures in a government as well as a culture both fueled by a non-stop toxic barrage of falsehood, fearmongering, and paranoia. They aren’t the only villains in the piece; they’re just the ones Keating singles out.

But appreciation for restraint aside, there’s perhaps too much of it, and the effect of the too-muchery plays as coy to the ear. Allusion’s a good narrative tool, but maybe a direct name-check would work better than nature imagery evoking Comey’s Twitter habit of posting elliptical messages married to (admittedly stunning) shots taken in the great outdoors. The opening lines of “Blue Skies Dandelions,” for instance, flirt with undisguised referral: “James says he never saw you laugh,” sings Wilder in the song’s opening verse, hinting at Comey’s claim that he never once heard the president chuckle. It’s a nice hint but likely to fly over most folks’ heads as memories grow overburdened by constant news updates in the social media era. On its own, the song works as a story of a man alienated from others, yearning for connection (“There must be something I can do / I wish I could make you less lonely,” goes the chorus). But as an allegory, it’s strained, lovely to the ear but so lyrically elusive as to be baffling.

Still, the aural cohesion across Erotic Reruns writ large imparts personality to the album. For a band boasting a confluence of influences as abundant as Yeasayer’s, the lines delineating feel distinct from each other. Their music never feels soupy in terms of inspiration; the album’s sound derives from any and every source imaginable, and yet the sound is all their own. What the album lacks in fine-tuning it makes up for in sheer experiential pleasure. It’s a half hour bop for the American experiment’s gradual decay.

Boston-based culture writer Andy Crump has been writing about film and television online since 2009 (and music since 2018). You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected writing at his personal blog. He is composed of roughly 65% craft beer.