Customer Reviews

You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well, sort of, anyway. You see, there are a couple of tracks that are very... EIGHTIES. And they are, well, pretty bloody awful actually, if listened to as single tracks ("I Love You" & "No More Words").

However, as an album, listened to in its entirety, it's FANTASTIC! The over-dated songs merge in with the good ones, making an album that flows very smoothly. There are, after all, some absoloute classics here.

"Lost Again" has a real emotional quality that many songs are lacking. The gravally vocals compliment the lyrics and guitars. "Crash Dance" is short and sweet, with the basic layout of a techno track. "Great Mission" and "You Gotta Say Yes..." are pretty bizarre, but that's part of Yello's charm, and it's all good fun (once you work out what the lyrics are...). "Swing" never fails to make my foot tap, and "Salut Mayomba" is a haunting latin-influenced piece of class.

Of course, you can take Yello, or you can leave them, but I strongly suggest you take this album. Before "Oh Yeah" and "The Race", before they got way too commercial, before the REAL excess of the eighties, Yello were one of the best. And this album is one of the best as well.

This is one of the oddest albums I have heard in a long time. Yello has always been an oddity. Songs like "Crash Dance", "You gotta say yes to another excess" are very odd indeed, but likable. My personal favorite on here is "I love you" just the sound & the way it's done is very interesting. I also liked "Lost again" it shows emotion & it's really great to listen to. This album does have a lot of synth in it, but it's worth listening too. I mean these are the same guys who made "Oh Yeah". It's definitely worth a listen!

For some reason never got much credit for their blend of new wave,funk,Italo-disco and early hip-hop. Deservedly The Art Of Noise got most of it and as you know both of these groups could'nt be more different. One of the main difference was Yello's high eccentricity,wit and humor and on their first two albums (1980 and 1981 respectively) they firmly established a unique sound that even to this day would be hard to copy. Of course Yello would get a lot of flack,even called names like "campy" (not used too kindly in their case) mainly because of how fully they embraced the 80's and it's instrumental and rhythmic ethic. But one could never give this trio (they still were that when this was released) for not being inventive and original in their approch. That and being able to progress technologically and musically as the decades music progressed was a big plus.

On this album Yello turned up the the funk and jazz elements of their sound. They'd always been present to a degree but they really leaped out here in many places. On "I Love You" and "No More Words" the hardcore electrofunk was laid on thick. Not only that but you also had songs such as "Great Mission" and the title cut which introduce swampy,slick and slinkly basslines and drum rolls to a brooding funk-fusion sound sort of like a more new wave variation of Miles Davis's sound during this era. On "Swing" there's a similar type of big band Cab Calloway flavor to the song. The exotic worldbeat influences of "Salut Mayoumba" and the stomping,likewise swing influenced "Crash Dance" round out this excellent set.

This album basically ammounted to the last of this particular aspect of their sound they would release. Now it's not that the sound they had on this and two previous albums before it (note how each album expanded rhytmically and musically to the next). Always searching for influences,both vocally and musically from just about everywhere in the globe,and often times seemingly from off of it for their rhythmic sound renderings Dieter Meier,Boris Blank and here Carlos Paron there was a sense that without any controversy as to orgins a sort of all world rhythm during the new wave era might actually work.