A return of guitars, groove, and caustic spirit: the Leeds crew serve up anything but elevator music.
All is in the title. Music makes reality more bearable; it helps to absorb, endure, resist, or escape the world and everyone who composes it, including ourselves. It’s a tale of distraction, and singer-narrator James Smith and his companions are convinced, despite the wry smile that lingers here and there since The Overload (2022), the English band’s debut album acclaimed for its biting chronicles in the style of The Fall.
Still as lucid and ironic, Yard Act thus questions, in this third album, its raison d’être and the meaning of its own music. It’s serious disguised as confrontation with the dramas of the era, analytical entertainment echoing the quartet’s personal doubts—and at the same time the exact opposite.
James Smith, dressed as a cabaret Nick Cave
Recorded between Leeds and Los Angeles, You’re Gonna Need a Little Music abandons the hip-hop inflections of its predecessor to lean toward Queens of the Stone Age and put guitars back at the center of the game. It alternates a slack, laid-back attitude with a more nervous rhythm, without renouncing the essential groove signed Yard Act and its traditional tirade (Janey Said), the obligatory centerpiece on each album by the quartet.
There must be tension, a touch of action, and no excuses for it, to borrow the words of James Smith, dressed as a cabaret Nick Cave, chanting over the discoid turns of the title track. It remains partly entertainment, whether necessary or not.
You’re Gonna Need a Little Music (Island Records/Universal). Release on July 17. In concert at La Cigale, Paris, on October 1 and at La Cabane, Toulouse, on the 18th.
