Boat People, The - yesyesyesyesyes (Album)

The Boat People have been with us for over five years now, and following a slew of crafty EPs and an almost inhuman touring schedule, they have produced their debut album, yesyesyesyesyesyes.

In their media release they describe themselves as "combining the pop sensibilities of Crowded House with the artistic ambition of Radiohead". That is a big claim, and while the album has many highlights it sounds more like a weird hybrid of Supertramp and the Lucksmiths. As a whole, the album has momentum but fails to really take off.

It starts on an absolute high. Clean is one track where everything seems to work for the band. An angular, hook-driven riff propels the song into a memorable chorus.

Unsettle My Heart follows and is definitely the perfect follow-up single to Clean. An impossibly catchy chorus is teamed up with brilliant, illustrative guitar parts and some rather abstract lyrics.

Sadly, the rest of the album does not match the stellar opening. The album lurches to the mid-way point, where the addition of the 2004 breakthrough single, Tell Someone Who Cares helps to raise the standard. However, it is in vain, given that it is followed up by the truly inane If We Can't Get It Together....

It is fair to say that "...I'll tell you the names of the streets as they go by/ and you can trace my path with your index finger, tell me what landmarks I'm about to see/ at least those you see in the street directory/ churches, parks and hotels, bowling clubs and golf clubs and masonic centres..." is not the best lyric on the album, but full marks for finding a rhyming couplet for the phrase “street directory”. To make it worse, it is sung to a melody that sounds like it belongs in a musical comedy.

Building Bridges, DiggingCaves goes some way to reviving the album and marks a brief return to the clever pop-fare of the first two tracks. The Picturesque weaves a dreamy landscape but borrows a few too many Radiohead clichés. The final song Me and the Sun ensures that the album peters out as opposed to any definitive end.

This is an ambitious album, which tries to cover a lot of ground and include a lot of sounds. Overall, the album lacks a defining statement and ends up sounding like four or five good songs combined with a few filler tracks with amazingly bad lyrics.

The Boat People have a good album in them, it's just that yesyesyesyesyesyes is not it.

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