Photo by Victor Buell
Milwaukee’s music scene has never been especially known for math rock, but since the days of Hero of a Hundred Fights, Akarso and Managra in the ’90s, it’s always hosted its share. Chalk it up to restlessness, perhaps: There will always be musicians bored by traditional song structures and drawn instead to twisty time signatures and dramatic loud/soft shifts. For the local math-rock trio YLLA, it’s an almost primal attraction. When you pair jazz chords against heavy music, explains singer/guitarist/trumpeter John Larkin, something uncanny happens.
“It brings out a lot of dissonance that you don’t usually find in music,” says Larkin. “It’s not like an evil-sounding dissonance, but rather these unique tones that result when you put a lot of distortion on a guitar playing those kinds of chords. There’s weird things that happen when you do that.”
And YLLA, whose sound finds a middle ground between the halting, jazz-drenched slash and burn of June of 44 and the heavy fusion of The Mars Volta, understand that their sound is fundamentally niche.
“We’ve had shows where people just leave, but that’s OK,” Larkin says. “We’re a lot louder than the bands we play with normally, so we don’t expect everybody to love us. But the people who do stay seem to appreciate what we do, and our shows generally go pretty well. We just played with a band called Ladders, who are like a softer, acoustic kind of band, but the crowd liked us, too, even though what we do is a lot more aggressive and a little weirder.”
Pieced together from compositions the group had been kicking around and reworking for the last couple of years, YLLA’s self-titled latest album is typically dense—seven tracks of rumbling bass, skronky noise, knotty guitars, misplaced violin and the occasional, cathartic scream. It was tracked over a productive weekend in a cabin in Oostburg with producer Victor Buell, from the psychedelic rock band Calliope, of which Larkin was once a member.
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“We liked the idea of getting out of the city for a project like that,” says Larkin. “It was just a lot more relaxing. Plus the way Vic records is very convenient. He doesn’t charge by the hour. It’s just a flat rate, then you work on it until it’s done, so that relieves a lot of pressure. It took us a while to settle in. When we started, we weren’t getting everything right, but once we got into the groove it wasn’t even difficult. We did takes all day, and just kind of relaxed and settled it. It wasn’t stressful at all, which is honestly the first time I can say that about any recording session I’ve been a part of.”
Stream YLLA’s self-titled album at ylla.bandcamp.com.
