Yello – Call It Love
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Two years later, Yello released One Second, which continued to refine their sound. Nearly as good as Stella, One Second closes the door on their more experimental work, and they settle into being imaginative, Euro-dance innovators, nearly all their tracks crafted for the dance floor. On One Second, they open their ranks slightly, inviting big-voiced Shirley Bassey (mostly known in this country for singing theme songs to James Bond movies, but a bigger star in her native England) and four-octaved Scottish singer Billy Mackenzie to sing a couple of songs. Call It Love comes from this album, and is one of my favorite of all Yello songs, with its odd, disjointed beginning and trademark blizzard of beats. There must be thirty different percussion sounds in a typical Yello tune, yet they all fit together so smoothly that you don’t really notice the astonishing variety unless you really listen to it. I love the way this song is constructed, and I especially favor the sexy hummed refrain, which gets stuck in my head all the time. Boris Blank has a remarkable gift for fitting wildly disparate elements together and making them sound all of a piece. He is especially good at varying the ambience of each particular sound, so that some of them are absolutely bone-dry with no presence whatsoever (usually the rhythm guitars) and others sounding like they were recorded in the world’s deepest well. What would quickly become a mess in lesser producer’s hands, muddy beyond comprehension, he somehow manages to keep clear. These sounds should not work together, and nobody else would ever think of trying to put them together, but under Blank’s masterful touch, they sound positively inevitable.
Considering they have such a cinematic sound, it’s surprising they haven’t done more film work. Their music has appeared in a couple of films, but they are usually shockingly bad films. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is fine, and The Secret of My Success isn’t completely without entertaining aspects, but those films licensed Oh Yeah after the fact. The only two films I know of that Yello supplied music to on purpose are Nuns on the Run and the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle, Ford Fairlaine. What the hell were they thinking?
Yello continued releasing albums sporadically through the ‘80s and ‘90s and, although they had a couple of international hits, the continued refinement of their sound led to the one thing early albums could never be accused of – predictability. They still had a great sound, their production continued to set the bar for synthpop and Euro-dance music, but they used to be a lot more than that and their formula, though winning, started wearing. Although I kept buying their discs out of respect, I didn’t listen to them much, with Baby and Zebra getting very little play. Their later albums, Pocket Universe and Motion Picture and, especially, The Eye, show some signs of life, and have a couple of good cuts in their old cinematic groove, but in general they haven’t been a vital musical force since the ‘80s gave way to the ‘90s and Flag gave way to Baby. As a recent review states, most synthpop bands would kill to have an album that sounded as good as Baby or Zebra, but one came to expect so much more from Yello that they are inevitably disappointments. Still, they’re mighty fine disappointments.