On Saturday Drag, YOWL certainly approached perfection. Their clever lyrics are matched by a brilliant composition swimming with anxieties and fizzed out Indie Rock flavours. Is it a masterpiece? It just might be. Third Outing introduce you to YOWL.
On Saturday Drag, YOWL certainly approached perfection. Their clever lyrics are matched by a brilliant composition swimming with anxieties and fizzed out Indie Rock flavours. Is it a masterpiece? It just might be. Third Outing introduce you to YOWL.
On Saturday Drag, there is a line you might yell at someone across an empty room, halfdrunk paranoiac: « I went to the doctor and I said I’ m scared again. Now I am scared of everyone.» But here it’ s not hollered, it’ s sung, almost poetically so, by Yowl’ s front man Gabriel Byrde. The band might at first sound apathetic and extremely laid-back, like they don’ t really care. But if you listen closely, their music goes beyond. First, the lyrics are directly self-reflective, dealing with real everyday troubles. For the vocals, though it sounds like Byrde just woke up and doesn’ t really make the effort to sing, it is actually the opposite, as the sheer effort to give‘ release’ seems to put more thought into every single word. Trying to find the holy in the mundane is a difficult thing, isn’ t it?
And so in our minds YOWL stands for one thing; « how to have casual, laconic delivery, with deep underlying poetic themes ». Gabriel Byrde is doing all this eloquent wordplay, but he’ s shedding it like it’ s nothing. It makes it stick so much more. You can be forgiven for missing the lyrics on first listen because they don’ t sound like they’ re supposed to be important, and then they creep into your brain and work on you later. That’ s rare. And that’ s why you listen again.
YOWL’ s sound is chaotic, it’ s anxious, and has definite throw-back to David Berman’ s Silver Jews. The bass flows perfectly, the mid tempo slowly and eventually gets quicker, darker and‘ drunker’. And so the song takes you on a journey. But for us it’ s all about the melody supporting this incredible vocal line, and making it stand out above all rest, creating the most important thing, the story. Merging everything together, and considering it all as one great adventure, YOWL have created almost the perfect song where nothing sounds out of place, and everything sounds‘ right there’.
Saturday Drag has a helplessness to it. We think this record is about accepting that. Stop fighting it, maybe the world is a lot bigger than you are, and there’ s not a lot you can do to influence it. But then, that’ s what music does isn’ t it? It influences things. And so we go round and round again...