No sooner had I canvassed views on Twitter as to whether Yard Act's debut The Overload was worth bothering with than along came an extended review of the album by Fergal Kinney. The article has received a lot of flak from some quarters, but to my mind it's exactly what the Quietus does best: a well-written, well-reasoned opinion piece that, while contentious, isn't provocative merely for the sake of cheap clicks and crystallises and succinctly verbalises some of my own half-formed thoughts.
One of my two reasons for not investigating The Overload sooner was irritation at the aggressive marketing campaign - at least in my little corner of the internet. But the other was, with hindsight, a growing jadedness with respect to bands of this ilk. Perhaps the first real signs of this fatigue can be traced back to being underwhelmed by Shame at Tramshed in November (though admittedly I'd seen and loved Working Men's Club at the Globe the previous night). Or maybe further back, to finding myself in no great rush to listen to Fontaines DC's second LP A Hero's Death. Or maybe even further back, to falling out of love with IDLES in the wake of Ultra Mono (not that we were ever really an item).
Kinney identifies the common thread that binds all of these bands together, other than a loose post-punk aesthetic: a speak-singing vocal style for which he uses the German label "sprechgesang". While acknowledging that this is nothing new (as Fall fans will tell you), he credits the style's "current vogue" to Sleaford Mods (specifically 2014's breakthrough album Divide And Exit) and goes on to offer a compelling argument to explain its popularity: "[T]he shock caused by a new Conservative government, austerity and the 2016 EU referendum seemed to force some kind of sea change. As a performance technique, sprechgesang provided bands with a powerful vehicle - a formal solution to the problem caused by the vocabulary of politics feeling jarring when sung. Sprechgesang counteracts the earnestness implicit in melody, shrinking the distance between vocalist and listener. It seemed particularly useful as a lens through which national decline or personal anxiety, or, even better, some combination of the two, could be observed."
The extent of Sleaford Mods' cultural influence is without doubt something to be celebrated - they're one of the most important acts the UK has produced in years. However, Kinney's argument is that we're now reaching - or indeed have already reached - saturation point. And this is where Yard Act come in.
Are these four Fall guys unfortunate to find themselves cast as Kinney's fall guys? Is it fair for him to use them as a punchbag in referring to "landfill sprechgesang"?
Kinney notes that the term "landfill indie" was coined in the wake of "the goldrush which followed NME's so-called New Rock Revolution. The major labels moved in and ill-prepared bands were fattened up and sent out to market." In this respect, the cap fits - Yard Act were snapped up by Island on the strength of very little, the pandemic having prevented them from finding their feet in a live environment, and that marketing campaign is evidence that there's plenty of money behind them. What's more, Kinney quotes frontman James Smith's candid comments from an interview with Louder Than War in which he admitted they'd seen the likes of IDLES, Fontaines DC and Shame enjoying success and seized their opportunity: "We definitely Trojan Horsed it, to get a bit of attention [off] the back of some of those groups but knowing we were gonna subvert it and move away from it as soon as we can. Which sounds quite cynical." From the horse's mouth...
Kinney continues: "Bad bands can toxify the good by speeding up the process by which a genre becomes exhausted or defined by cliche." Branding Yard Act a "bad band" would be a step too far - his negative assessment of The Overload is a little overegged, I think, and Smith's lyrics certainly have their moments. (Unlike Kinney, I rather enjoyed the image of "knobheads Morris dancing to Sham 69".)
But the fact is that, for me, nearly all of Kinney's criticisms of the album ring true to some degree: the curiously dated reference points, the "stock liberal generalities", the "imagination deficit" that means that state-of-the-nation tracks like 'Dead Horse' deal in clunky metaphors and little more. He's right to identify 'Tall Poppies' as the standout - it was the first and indeed only song to really stop me in my tracks - but even then, on reflection, there's some truth to his claim that its plot twist merely gives "the hack illusion of narrative arc and emotional satisfaction", another cynical and cliched device.
Yard Act don't do themselves any favours by opening the album with a wearied, dismissive "Yeah, yeah, yeah" - precisely pre-empting the reaction of anyone who, like Kinney, detects a distinct slide into tired cliche. And when on the aforementioned 'Dead Horse' Smith bemoans the fact that "this once great nation" has failed to nurture "good music", its "last bastion of hope", the irony-o-meter goes off the scale at the line "We've been trapped by the same crowd that don't like it unless they've heard it before." It's precisely that familiarity and lack of appetite for the new that Yard Act are now monetising.
Kinney comes to a sensible conclusion, refusing to throw the baby out with the bathwater: "[W]e shouldn't be in a rush to bury the sprechgesang mode", not with the likes of Benefits and Self Esteem continuing to make artistically creative use of it. The problem, he argues, "lies with bands who are talking loud but have little of use to say".
There has been - and will no doubt continue to be - the inevitable and tedious backlash against the review, branding Kinney a snob for sneering at something (relatively) popular. He notes IDLES singer Joe Talbot's recent disparaging onstage comments about "pseudo-intellectuals masquerading as journalists" (JR Moores' evisceration of Ultra Mono clearly still smarts). But you can't make issues and ideas your schtick (rather than just the music, maaaan) and then cry "Pseudo-intellectual!" at anyone who has the temerity to challenge the substance of what you're saying.
In fairness, Yard Act appear to have largely taken the kicking on the chin - publicly, at least. The album is only out this week, but already I'm interested to hear what comes next - will they "subvert [sprechgesang] and move away from it as soon as we can", as promised, or will they settle for comfortable cliche?
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