You Am I - You Am I (Album)

You Am I’s self-titled ninth studio album is a cracker and it’s probably because they did it all themselves.

Recently parting company with EMI, the band are the flagship signing for Other Tongues, a fast rising Sydney indie label, with a hand-picked crew to do the legwork.

You Am I was recorded in various studios and over various sessions, with songs being recorded as they developed, not one after the other to a tight schedule. This is the sound of a band getting to meet the songs for the first time.

It’s immediate, raw in its honesty and even on the edge of chaos in places, but the record swaggers with freedom and excitement as the music takes form.

Album opener, We Hardly Knew You, is a 6/8 swagger, with a retro slap echo on Tim Rogers’ raspy vocals and a menacingly loose time signature as the band lunges and parries with some unknown enemy. Maybe the lyric “My head is on fire” gives an insight into this violent waltz.

There’s poetry in the slow pulse of Kicking the Balustrade (balustrade being the little poles topped by a rail along a staircase or balcony) along with a sense of reckless danger the song title would suggest: “Time is the privilege of the opulent mind / but it’s as free as the sweat trickling down your sleeve, / as the trash blowing down your street”. Rogers half-whispers over palm-muted guitars. And then there’s a deathly scream. This isYou Am I at the edge of something new and unexplored.

Some may wonder whether Tim Rogers’ reputation has overshadowed You Am I’s music, and although the band is clearly not just the Rogers Show (his name is last on the sleeve credits and his voice sometimes sits a little low in the rockin’, raw, live mix) it seems at times they have gone to lengths to draw attention from the frontman.

Megan Washington makes a cameo for Lie and Face the Sun, proving it’s not all about Rogers whilst giving You Am I a fresh face and Washington a bit of whiskeyed grit. Similarly in The Good Ones, Rogers’ is part-buried beneath the guitars. All the better for you to sing along loudly, pouting with a half-smile. Classic You Am I.

The first single, Shuck is perfect pop (with balls), the lyrics of which may very likely even bewilder Rogers: “The super power I wanted: to freeze motion and thought in all others while I romanced... / Forty years living in the back of my throat / I’m still trusting my super freakin’ skills.” A sonnet it ain’t.

One wonders if the band even knows where Crime is going and, given the manner in which the album was recorded, it is possible that this is the sound of a band getting to meet a song for the first time. The Ocean sports dirty guitars and drum noises surrounded by neat harmonies and catchy mmm bop bop vocal hooks like the drunk uncle in a room full of polite pre-teens. “Trust the turbulence,” Rogers urges.

Pinpricks is the first really uptempo shit kicker - it’s all over in two and a quarter minutes - while Waiting to be Found Out is all dotted eighths, finger picked electric major sevenths, delicate melodic vocals, chimes, sleigh bells, hand claps and a drummer that could be only eyes-closed-smiling with the double-stroked rattata-rattata snare taps.

Lanie Lane makes an appearance in Trigger Finger, sounding delightfully like an Andrews Sister lost in the 21st century. Album closer, Let’s Not Get Famous, introduces an airy piano recorded with all the gentle background hiss of an empty room. Like the best You Am I moments, there’s beauty and humour side by side:

The best laid plans of mice and men
Were noble before the crowd walked in
Let’s not do it until that we’re sure that
We’re not clinging onto air
Let’s not get famous...
Yet

Share this review on Facebook