You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, by Yard Act
The UK city of Leeds deserves credit for bands like Gang of Four and Mekons, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s used artistic and theoretical tools, including postmodernism, to interrogate punk rock until it confessed that it wanted to explore a postpunk identity.
Yard Act, a much more recent Leeds band whose first full-length, Overload, came out in 2022, isn’t really an interrogator. It still asks a lot of questions on its third full-length, You’re Gonna Need a Little Music.
One question—how to match the critically acclaimed and, in the homeland anyway, commercially successful debut and 2024 follow-up Where’s My Utopia?—finds an answer through a decision to record live, with all band personnel in the same room.
In the opening track, “Empty Pledges,” Yard Act turns the resultant interplay into a speedball: James Smith declaims traveling experiences, residual emotions, and existential doubt while his dark piano joins Samuel Shipstone’s wasp-swarm guitar, Ryan Needham’s low-end bass, and Jay Russell’s stomping drums to build musical menace behind all those troubled thoughts.
If “Empty Pledges” encourages the band to linger in shadows inhabited by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, then “Tall Tales” goads it into comparative sunshine filtered through village-idiot Ray-Bans spiritually passed from the Kinks to Blur and Gorillaz, although a jolly springing rhythm and pub-whimsical keyboards provide no filters to Smith’s observant skepticism.
There are also hints of Mott the Hoople and Leonard Cohen (the self-aware, road-trip title track), a literate folk-rocker’s idea of mellow P.M. Dawn hip-hop (“Janey Said”), and freeway-velocity Ted Leo-style poppy punk layered with English irony (“Cherophobe Rock”).
American producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen ensures the sonic consistency he’s also given to Paramore and Jimmy Eat World, but the greater consistency comes from Yard Act’s belief that listeners are actually going to need more than a little philosophy and much more than a little music.
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