Photo via Yard Act - Facebook
Yard Act
Yard Act
There is a moment on “The Undertow,” a standout track on Where’s My Utopia?, the second album from the UK-based band Yard Act, when vocalist James Smith asks, “What’s the guilt worth/If you do nothing with it?” It is a question that hangs over much of Where’s My Utopia?, one of the strongest records released so far this year.
For Smith, such a question is undoubtedly informed by leaving his twenties behind—and by having a child. “I suppose I’m at the age where I’m no longer young, but I’m definitely not old,” explains Smith. “I was 32 and had just become a dad for the first time when I wrote Where’s My Utopia?”
That in-between feeling—along with his status as a new father—leads Smith, through the lyrics on Where’s My Utopia?, to travel throughout moments in his life as he attempts to, well, do something with his guilt. This is most apparent on “Down by the Steam,” which finds Smith reliving, in agonizing detail (he names names!), the time he bullied a childhood friend. “I think the trauma of ‘Down by the Stream,’” notes Smith, “is first and foremost to do with me wanting to acknowledge I am capable, as all humans are, of doing bad. Of being mean, nasty, vicious, of being a bully.”
Moving Beyond Past Trauma
Yet is clear that Smith wants to do more than acknowledge this aspect of the human condition. Through traveling back to this painful childhood incident, Smith must confront the fact that he too was bullied as a youth. He then makes a pledge to make sure his own son will never behave in such an abhorrent way. And for the people mentioned in “Down by the Stream”? As Smith notes, “The positive is that I’ve reconnected with all people from that song. We’re all friends again.” What’s the guilt worth, if you do something with it?
There is something liberating about moving beyond past trauma, of finding agency in a history that had previously seemed preordained. Perhaps not surprisingly, the songs on Where’s My Utopia? often sound loose and fun; this is not a total downer of a record. While it may seem odd to hum along to a song about childhood bullying, Yard Act understand the power of such juxtapositions, of letting the serious and the playful collide. “Art that denies silliness its place within,” explains Smith, “can never fully represent the human experience. We laugh even as we cry.”
“A Vineyard in the North,” the last song on Where’s My Utopia?, ends with the line, “This is the hour of letting pain go.” For an album preoccupied with the non-linear quality of time, of time’s malleability, it is an optimistic end to the record. “I suppose the idea of time being non-linear makes everything instantly quite vague,” concludes Smith. “Like nothing matters. But there’s a great comfort in that and as I get older I get more and more comfortable with vagueness.” In going back and reexploring earlier moments of hurt, Where’s My Utopia? suggests that we are not bound to our past selves, a powerful conclusion to a powerful record.
Yard Act perform on Thursday, Oct. 3 at X-Ray Arcade.
