Yello

Legend has it that Boris Blank was walking through an abandoned industrial site with a tape recorder, banging things and recording their sounds. He turned a corner and surprised Carlos Peron, who was doing precisely the same thing. From that chance meeting, Yello was born. Yello is the only Swiss group I know of, and if they are any indication of what goes on in that country, than the Borgias can keep their Renaissance, give me chocolate and cuckoo clocks any day.

Blank and Peron supplied the wildly inventive palette of noises that made up the distinctive sound of Yello. Not content to follow in anybody else’s footsteps, they used electronics and tapes and effects in wholly original ways, their music sounds unlike anything else anybody else was doing. Other groups were interested in electronic music, but they usually slavishly followed the cold robotic precision of Kraftwerk or the lush sound of the new romantics, with their deep debt to disco. This is, of course, not to disparage either, as I love both, but Yello’s music wasn’t beholden to either of those camps. Much of what they did had a strong beat and was popular on the dance floor, but they tended towards more Latin rhythms, with tracks like Downtown Samba, Pinball Cha Cha, and Bananas to the Beat. These tracks were full of unusual sounds, and they’d pull their rhythmic accents from the most unlikely sources. It’s not uncommon to be settling into one of their grooves and suddenly hear pig grunts or footsteps or clocks ticking or chickens squawking in perfect rhythm.

But as creative as they were with their beats, they were not tied to the dance floor, and their early albums are full of intriguing, industrial soundscapes, or haunting, cinematic mood poems. The tracks blend and flow into each other, creating mysterious soundtracks to unseen movies. Blank and Peron were masters of sound, and made music that existed in some alternate reality, seemingly influenced by nobody, surreal, beautiful, mysterious, propulsive.

And then there’s Dieter Meier.

I have a theory that once somebody’s music starts getting too cool, the aural equivalent of the Men in Black come visiting and make them put some smelly vocalizing on it to take the edge off. Severed Heads starts getting too interesting? Make Tom Ellard sing, that’ll keep them in line. Tackhead pushing the envelope of hardcore industrial dance funk a little too hard? Give them Gary Clail to megaphone his irritating slogans over the crushing beats. Art of Noise raising the bar a bit high? Stick them with Max Headroom. And since nobody made more exciting, interesting, and innovative music than Yello, then nobody got a worse vocalist.

It boggles my mind that somebody so creative and so far ahead of the musical curve as Boris Blank would allow his meticulously assembled, gorgeously evocative jewels to be shat upon by somebody so irritating and artless as Dieter Meier. I had a theory about this too. Making music like this, especially at this point in time, took an enormous amount of energy and, especially, equipment. And Yello wasn’t exactly making double platinum albums. The money had to come from somewhere. And Dieter Meier is a millionaire industrialist, a professional gambler and a member of Switzerland's national golf team (!). So my theory is that Dieter foots the bills in exchange for getting to put whatever bizarre and inappropriate vocals he wanted to all over Boris and Carlos’ beautiful tracks. This is especially true on the first two Yello albums, where every time the music starts to get really good, here comes Dieter with some really bad poetry yelled at top volume or some teeth-grindingly awful performance-art ramblings or bad psuedo-art radio dramatics. Occasionally, the vocals kind of fit the tracks and can be ignored, but more often than not, they just crash into the room, knocking over the delicate track and trampling it into unlistenable sludge. One has to work really hard to hear around Dieter’s verbal diarrhea, but the little snatches that shone through were so intriguing that I kept sticking with it. Finally, with You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess, my patience was rewarded.

You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess is a giant leap forward in Yello’s work. The production, which had always been a bit muddy, starts to take on a more distinct, more sophisticated sheen. The songs still employ a breathtakingly original sonic palette, but they’re organized into more coherent chunks. Rhythms predominate, but they are created from entirely different sources and sounds than anybody else would – or could – do. There’s something slightly familiar about a lot of the sounds, but they’ve been twisted and processed so completely that they take on a mystifying character. And finally, even Dieter had started to settle down and made his bizarre rantings fit the music a little better instead of just getting in the way – like he was actually listening to what else was going on around him. His lyrics were still largely nonsense, but at least it was somewhat appropriate nonsense. He can even achieve something close to touching, as on the curiously wistful Lost Again. Continuing their exploration of alternative types of dance music, You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess (you gotta say no to such a long album title), includes the wonderful Swing, a twisted take on big band music that perfectly captures their unique combination of familiar and bizarre. There’s a haunting, sparse, evocative narrative piece comparing the lushness and efficiency of the jungle with “the excess of the belly dance in Abu Dhabi and the excess of the everlasting night in Manhattan” interspersed with gigantic, thundering, electronic burps. There’s a track, Pumping Velvet, that sounds like a distant cousin to the stripped down airless funk sound of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues, which was in vogue at the time. And the album closes with a bizarre, sweaty, all-or-nothing instrumental dance track that starts slow and creepy and ends up in an ecstatic, orgasmic explosion and features what sounds like glaciers ripping apart and strumming mandolins. A bracingly weird, excitingly original, wholly infectious, completely satisfying album. Fortunately, Eric was as smitten as I was because I could not get enough of it and wanted to hear it constantly.