There’s a long and rich tradition of scabrous indie rock lyricism from Yorkshire. Sheffield’s Jarvis Cocker and Alex Turner tend to get the plaudits, but the particular kind of gimlet-eyed social observation and pub philosopher’s knack for a toothsome phrase can be found from Hull (Paul Heaton) to Rotherham (Rebecca Lucy Taylor), and Todmorden (Sydney Minsky-Sargeant of Working Men’s Club). And Leeds has its whole own strain, starting with the screeds of The Mekons and Gang of Four, running through David Gedge and Ricky Wilson in his spikier moments to Lily Fontaine of English Teacher and, very notably, James Smith of Yard Act.
Smith certainly doesn’t mind being part of a lineage – he even namechecks Gedge and The Wedding Present in “Empty Pledges,” the opening track here. He’s certainly carved out his own space though, heavy on the stream of consciousness, with piled-on internal rhymes and wordplay that owe as much to hip hop as anything (yes, he rhymes “know who David Gedge is” with “pledges” – as well as “front wedges” and “custom reg’s”, which obviously works a lot better heard than read.) On this third Yard Act album, all of that is ramped up even more, often to a point of neck-snapping “did he just say that?” double takes as he twists, bends and pleats sound and meaning of words until they start to give way.
Sometimes it can feel like he’s trapped in wrestling the language itself and wondering what good it is, a theme that seems to echo explicitly through the one-two punch of “Tall Tales” and “Fiction” and implicitly through so many other songs where motifs of bullshitting or talking at cross purposes appear again and again. Even gentle vignette of meeting and old flame in a hipster Berlin café in “Janey Says” is partly about language, however clever or poetic it may be, failing to bridge a gap. And the anthemic title track and the genuinely harrowing “Redeemer” both pile on surrealism, meta-narrative and more and more and more words until a pressure valve blows, in the latter case with an ecstatic chorus, in the latter through completely breaking down into ragged screaming of the title.
If this all sounds like it might be exhausting to the listener, well yes, it can be. But critically, the rest of the band have stepped up to the challenge on this album. In contrast to the twitchy post-punk of Yard Act past, the rage in “Redeemer” is backed up by the kind of rock meatiness that Josh Homme’s production brought to The Arctic Monkeys. Elsewhere you can hear Bowie and Roxy, Blockheads, Madness, Oasis if they had an imagination, The Wonderstuff at their peak, and perhaps most bizarrely Pop Will Eat Itself on the maniacal “Thrill of the Chase”. It’s quite the ride, and while on occasion it can feel oppressively like being trapped in the head of a man who is himself trapped in his own head, it’s still an extremely impressive development for Yard Act and a grand addition to Leeds’s marvellously gobby lineage.
Listen to "Redeemer":
