Yello

Two years later, I was in my second year at Hampshire College and had taken a bus into neighboring Northampton to kill a Saturday afternoon and go to the area’s best record store, Main Street Records. I walked in and glanced over the new arrivals rack and was delighted to see a new album from Yello, called Stella. I snatched it up, cut my afternoon short, and caught the next bus back to campus so I could hear it.

If I had to pick an overall favorite Yello album, Stella would be it. The improvement in sound was absolutely astonishing, and I didn’t think it could get any better than on You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess. The production was gigantic and crystalline, with songs sounding like they were carved right out of the wind. They were now a duo, having dropped Carlos Peron, but even Dieter Meier was in rare form, his vocals actually enhancing most of the tracks they appear on.

The album opens with two surprisingly straight songs, Desire and Vicious Games. They both have very standard structures and even some pretty basic electric guitar noodling. But the production sets them apart from anything else being done at the time – with the possible exception of Trevor Horn. Somehow, both Boris Blank and Trevor Horn managed to squeeze sounds out of their studios that were years ahead of their contemporaries. The music has an impossible depth, it is incredibly airy, full of echo, yet extremely precise at the same time, each sound standing in perfect isolation and yet contributing seamlessly to the whole. It is absolutely breathtaking. And those are the least interesting tracks on the album. Then comes Oh Yeah, and the album takes off into uncharted territory.

Oh Yeah became Yello’s biggest hit, thanks, partly, to its inclusion in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Secret of My Success. Oh Yeah sounds like nothing else, and is impossibly catchy. The combination of Meier’s deep treated vocals, the wild, almost cartoony percussive elements, the polished and engaging production, the inventive arrangement, and the repeating “chick-chicka-chikaahh” make the song absolutely irresistible. Unfortunately. Despite its appeal, it didn’t really catch on until well after Stella had been released, so it was also released on the next album, One Second, as well, and appears as a B-Side on numerous singles. As much as I love Yello and this song in particular, I got a bit tired of it.

The rest of Stella is superb, with tight, scratchy rhythm guitars juxtaposed next to the biggest, echoing-through-the-Grand Canyon bass and propulsive beats and imaginative sounds blended together in fantastic arrangements. There’s the melodramatic, horror-film soundtrack Stalkadrama, the scorching, guitar-driven ode to internal holiness Domingo, and the frenetic percussion orgy (featuring a chicken) Let Me Cry. The album ends with a phenomenal one-two punch. Ciel Ouvert, the longest cut on the album, is a cinematic instrumental that sounds like a heroic journey through treacherous lands and has the biggest sounds possible, large enough to topple a mountain. For years, this was the track I used to test a stereo or set of speakers, as it has both some of the most delicate sounds imaginable as well as some of the deepest and most stirring. Listening to it, even after hundreds – if not thousands – of times, still gives me goose bumps. This leads directly into the last cut, the blazing Angel No, a dance-till-you-drop track with punchy horns, nuclear bass notes, and body-slamming beats.

Through their body of work, Yello became one of “the big three”, the holy trinity of groups that sat at the absolute apex of my musical loves during the ‘80s and ‘90s, but they would’ve made it there on the strength of this album alone (Art of Noise and Fats Comet/Tackhead are the other two). It is that rarest of entities in my collection, an absolutely perfect album, with not a dead spot on it, and joins the rarified ranks of the half-dozen or so other albums to achieve such a distinction.