Spectreview: Yard Act – The Overload

Released: Jan 21, 2022

Post-Punk

-PURPLE-

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“Don’t have to justify my rage, being a hypocrite
Does not devalue the merit of the accusations made
Everybody’s got dirt on everybody else in this day and age, mind”

The hyperbolic circus of British music press endures. I’m watching it happen again and I find myself comforted by its occurrence; to watch the NME feverishly tout another band as next in a long lineage of rock acts, regardless of history’s unfolding, is something reliable and grounding in a tumultuous series of years.

During that time there’s no question that the UK has pumped out some exciting bands – many of whom I’ve already covered – and the storm of their common aesthetic seems to be reaching an apex in a band like Yard Act, who have become one of the most hyped acts out of Britain since, again, the last time this all happened. There’s also no question this band carries the post-punk mantle in a way that their genre-bending contemporaries don’t. It might be unintentional, but you listen to “Fixer Upper” and tell me they aren’t straight-cut, Jo-Ann style, from the cloth of The Fall. If they were a product in a grocery store, they’d be Orange Juice w/ Pulp.

And as far as the lamentable “post-Brexit new wave” tag that some poor hapless Guardian writer tried to lay down like a wet blanket, this band could easily take that tag. Frontman James Smith writes acerbic, loquacious, uroboric sprawls that change constantly on their way from the page to the stage, and they usually address whichever all-consuming plight currently poisoning Western society needs addressing.

This is a band mathematically designed to tick our boxes, right? They’re aesthetically relevant, politically rebellious, rhythmically danceable, influenced by the choicest of tastes and conceptually befitting a world whose nerves have been sufficiently fried. Their debut LP’s called The Overload, for Christ’s sake! There’s a verse in the song where he pretends to be an obnoxious industry figure! This is the part where we get to wax lyrical about how transcendental they are and feel the dopamine rushing as we pull out all the big words in the process, right?

Sure, I’m being knowingly hypocritical, and being knowingly hypocritical in a critique of a record that’s about the human nature behind being knowingly hypocritical kind of kills the argument. I can’t help it, you know? It’s just fun to be a little shit sometimes! Millennial solipsism is the best! Smith certainly knows it, and he can’t help it here either. Take that opening title track, which introduces the band as purveyors of overwhelm; Smith, I believe, is talking for perhaps 85% of its runtime. That bit about the industry guy sees him skewering his penchant for political screeds and self-aware musings so rapidly it’ll make your head spin.

There’s an effect here that immediately recalls the one that helped bring Arctic Monkeys to prominence, where the brain gets flooded and comprehension gets jammed, leaving the pure pleasure of being surrounded by words. The overarching punchline, one I’m sure is purposeful, is that a band so willing to point out how information transmission have blinded our senses gleefully contributes to that barrage. (It’s worth mentioning that maybe such a tactic is less effective in a globalized environment where rappers have perfected the art of verbalizing over music, but if you put your blinders on and narrow your scope to just guitar-based music, it feels a little better.)

The Rapture’s Luke Jenner claimed that post-punk is not an album genre, that its essence is just about having that one song that kicks ass. Yard Act’s breakthrough moment, “Fixer Upper,” is certainly that song, mostly because it’s primarily a character study that happens to be laced with whip-smart sociopolitical undertones. Smith might be beating you over the head lyrically, but he’s not shouting the point, he’s shouting around the point. We all know the kind of entitled, nationalistic person he’s talking about, and that implicit context allows him to narrow in on the kind of absurdity that would torch such a character (“Where you come from says a lot about a man/and I’m not round here, but I am”). But the track is also a banger, with a driving rhythm section and sharp lead guitar line that reads as classic post-punk.

The effectiveness of that song has caused Smith, as the band’s frontman, to be defined by his balancing act between levity and gravity. Has that balance ever been anything other than precarious? Naturally it hits inconsistently across The Overload, but I think it primarily has something to do with the didacticism anchoring what are meant to be generally humorous songs. It needs refinement here. What Smith does really well are character studies, and the record’s best songs definitely fit that description. “Tall Poppies” is an examination of a golden child marked for an early death that’s rich with detail and genuinely touching, even if it discards that focus as it concludes. Similarly, while “Rich” doesn’t exactly flesh out its newly-affluent narrator, it still builds to a warped destination that’s unquestionably memorable.

Elsewhere, like on “Dead Horse” and “The Incident,” Smith’s words flow rather brutishly and his choruses feel rudimentary, ungraceful. The points he wants to convey, while important, are muddied by his decision to spell them out so unsubtly. It illustrates how tough it is to make effective political art in an era where a foray onto any given social media will likely include a biting, succinct version of such an endeavor. Succinctness, by design, is not something that Smith practices here (when he does, like on “Witness (Can I Get A?)” the brevity feels unsubstantial) and it becomes a double edged sword that lifts and hurts his arguments in kind. On “Payday,” musically one of the record’s more engaging songs, he actually weighs the energy down despite the creativity of his couplets through a confusing message and a stilted delivery. The absence of “Fixer Upper” here is maybe a hidden blessing because I think its inclusion would highlight exactly how unpolished some of these works come across.

I could continue to nitpick, but I have to remind myself that on a base level Smith is never not entertaining as a frontman. When I put away the lyric sheet and stow the judgment for a hot second, I can totally appreciate the sensory effect of his voice, thick with Yorkshire accent and flexible enough to tighten and loosen around his subjects. It drips with menace on “Rich” and radiates empathy on “Tall Poppies” and “100% Endurance.” On “Land of the Blind” he slows down enough that his words actually become discernible on first listen, and in that context his natural gift for working around the band’s rhythm becomes blindingly apparent.

Speaking of the band, their efforts form a similar grab bag of highs and lows here. I’ve heard accusations of unoriginality lobbed at Yard Act since they started garnering public interest, and that’s fair enough. Post-punk’s general atonality inherently homogenizes a lot of entries in the genre which, again, may be a problem through the narrow scope of rock music but doesn’t matter as much when the modern music world at large is perfectly fine with homogenization. What’s more important is that they differentiate themselves through engaging arrangements, and they do achieve that on The Overload, if inconsistently.

The record’s standouts are obvious; the title track is fittingly manic, “Land of the Blind” bears a sublimely casual hook, and “Tall Poppies” has a wounded Bob Stinson-esque chorus that underlines the tragedy of the song’s doomed protagonist. “Payday” reaches a high near its end with a demented flute melody (is that a whistle? A piccolo?) and “100% Endurance’s” warm keyboard makes its existential weariness more effective. But for each of those songs, there’s a track like “Quarantine the Sticks” or “The Incident” or “Witness (Can I Get A?)” which feel more like generic post-punk workouts without critical elements to make them more unique. Smith is naturally the focus on The Overload, but there are points on it where it’s less because of his own efforts and more because by default he’s the only interesting thing going on.

What we have, in summary, is a competent debut LP that showcases Yard Act not as a fully-formed machine but as an ambitious group still doing a fair bit of troubleshooting. That’s fine, except they could really hit it big, and that’s a perilous environment for a band that’s still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. While the band’s future studio efforts will hopefully display a little refinement, there’s no denying how enjoyable this particular take on post-punk is. In a world caught in a feedback loop and subsumed by sound and fury, it’s effective enough that a band is willing to risk explicating the possibility that we signify nothing.

Recommended for a flag in a Glastonbury crowd.