courtesy photo
by Jacob Zlomke | audio by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Yuppies just won't sit still.
On the Omaha quartet's self-titled debut full-length, stream-of-consciousness style poetry as lyrics suggest a desperation of movement, a jet-propelled escape from the flat bleakness of the prairie. But much like driving through Midwest states on Interstate 80, it feels like a treadmill.
There is no resolution to the existential dread. “We’re on the worst vacation,” they say on “Right Now.” The worst vacation with no destination, no beginning, no end. Yuppies then, comes off as the release of all the pent-up frustration from lack of forward momentum. You can’t escape the dreary treadmill, so hit your drum skins as hard as you can, and scream to be heard over the ensuing cacophony.
When pressed about what the album means, though, vocalist and guitarist Jack Begley says he just wants you to listen and interpret.
After forming in 2007, Yuppies have released a couple seven inches, and a split with the British band Bitches, but Yuppies, now streaming on Pitchfork and label Dull Tools’ Bandcamp, is their first album proper.
“It’s more polished and thought out,” Begley says. “These previous recordings were much more crudely recorded, basement recordings to cassette.”
He calls the record cohesive. He calls it practiced, and he calls the songs a collaborative effort between all members of the band. But that’s about it.
“We really just want the listener to experience it for themselves.”
Fair enough. The album does deserve a front-to-back listen. The end of one track seamlessly flows into the beginning of the next, and this record is meant as a whole piece. And Begley’s ultimately right about the record’s sound compared to the band’s previous releases. Early Yuppies releases are mashed together with violent lo-fi noise and indecipherable vocals, but Yuppies is a record from a band with a completely different mission.
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Their 2008 three-track record I’ve Been Touched sounds like a band unconcerned with proper mixing, just four kids having fun in a basement, peaking microphones and burying any melody beneath mounds of discordant noise. Yuppies is the record of a practiced band in a professional setting. Having signed to the Dull Tools label — owned by Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage — Begley says the songs on the record were rehearsed tirelessly before going into the studio.
“Having an opportunity to use a studio, we really wanted to take advantage of that.”
They still pile on the basement noise here and there, though. “Getting Out,” with coarse vocals more wailing and shouting than singing, breaks down in its final minute from typical punk rock with machine gun percussion to dissonant guitar drones and scattered drums. There is little room for space of thought.
But on the very next track, “Hitchin’ a Ride,” although it too wraps with all the sound funneling into the final moments, Yuppies play with the space a little. The guitar riffs chug forward, pulsating with increasingly frantic vocals. But there is occasionally room to breathe in between the repeated riffs, shouted vocals and crashing cymbals.
While calling the record post-punk in the spirit of ‘90s alternative rock might be somewhat accurate, it’s too limiting for Yuppies. The music can mesmerize at times, like the soundtrack for some twisted punk rock fun house. Aggressive guitars conjuring images of broken guitar strings give way to quiet talk-singing and a muted bassline.
And nods to bands of the ‘90s do abound on Yuppies. Vocalists Begley and Noah Sterba have seemingly learned their craft from listening to Sonic Youth, Pixies and Pavement. Sometimes it’s hardly singing, more just absent-minded speaking, mostly in a rhythm, like a madman who can’t stop rambling about nobody even knows what anymore. Often, when it is definitely singing, it’s an apathetic drone, which by the end of the song will escalate to shouting.
But it’s not 1991. Yuppies are not the spokespeople for a group of disillusioned Generation X-ers.
Probably, that’s not what they’re trying to be, even if it’s hard to ignore the similarities. It’s also dismissive to see only those similarities. Yuppies are a band that have made an impressively clean, sonically diverse fuzz-rock record that might flood some Sonic Youth fan with nostalgia, but they have their own ideas: aggressive discord, the differences between noise and space.
Of course, as Begley puts it, “That’s for each listener to interpret.”
Yuppies play Richmond, Va., this week and tour the East Coast before looping back to the Midwest. They’ll play a show in Omaha at West Wing on October 19.
Jacob Zlomke is an editorial intern at Hear Nebraska. His worst vacation was a rainy family reunion in some forgotten Kansas town. Reach him at jacobz@hearnebraska.org.