WE ARE FREE
2007
All Hour Cymbals
About This Album
With its mixture of world music rhythms, westernized pop structures, and ethnic weirdness, Yeasayer's debut finds a home somewhere between the trendy bars of Brooklyn and the villages of developing countries. On paper, the album looks like an all-out mess, a jumbled pile of sitars, synths, bongos, sequencers, fretless bass, choir harmonies, and whatever else Yeasayer deems necessary to conjure up the globetrotting images that fuel these 11 tracks. But All Hour Cymbals rarely strains under its own weight, even when it mixes Beach Boys harmonies with minimalist art rock ("No Need to Worry") or steel drums with sludgy, Sabbath-styled metal ("Wait for the Wintertime"). New York City has hosted its share of experimental bands in the early 21st century, from TV on the Radio to Animal Collective to the otherworldly experiments of Grizzly Bear. Still, Yeasayer's appeal is not that they're otherworldly, but are instead entirely grounded in this world. Rarely does a debut album sound so geographic, so well-traveled -- even if the journey through All Hour Cymbals feels slightly odd, as if the bandmates constructed some Paleozoic musical map in their heads where the landmasses of Africa and America had been pushed together, blending the disparate traditions and instruments from both continents.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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