by David Wilikofsky
There is no shortage of guitar-centric post punk coming out of the UK these days, and Yard Act’s The Overload lands in a field crowded with critical favorites. The component parts of their music are instantly familiar: guitar riffs, funky rhythms, half sung half spoken vocals. Their schtick falls into the same boat, with frontman James Smith playing the wisecracking, straight talking frontman spinning tragicomic tales of modern life. It’s not groundbreaking stuff by any means, but Yard Act execute it so well you’d be forgiven for thinking differently; despite the competition, the band has managed to separate themselves from the pack. Their debut album dazzles, a portrait of our times that crackles with humor and humanity.
The Overload introduces us to a ragtag cast of misfits. You have the con man who claims to have invented “a different type of prison for a brand new type of crook”, the upwardly mobile, the litigious asshole, the family man who never leaves his hometown. While the band have stated that the album is explicitly anti-capitalist, they wisely resist the urge to turn these characters into jokes or caricatures just to make a point. Even though an unnamed rich man has done some terrible things, he’s at least partially motivated by the fear of losing it all. The con man obsesses about slipping into irrelevancy. The golden boy at the center of “Tall Poppies” would have discovered he wasn’t so exceptional if he ever ventured out of his hometown, so it’s ambiguous if the sheltered life he led is sad or satisfying. It’s largely left as an exercise to the listener to cast moral judgements, but more often than not the true villain seems to be the societal structures that motivates these characters’ actions.
Even beyond these nuanced characters the writing shines. In a recent interview the band drew comparisons between their music and rap, and although The Overload is definitively not rap you can hear a certain kinship between the two. There’s a shared delight in the possibilities of language, for a phrase to break your heart or a punchline to make you double over with laughter; both happened to me repeatedly while listening. It never ceases to delight me that the subject of the album’s longest song, “Tall Poppies”, is said to hate long songs with too many words, while the album’s closing song teases the beauty out of existential angst. I could go on; it’s a downright literary album, one where every song feels like a fully fleshed out short story.
The album closer, “100% Endurance”, details the discovery of alien life on other planets. Humans interview all these different lifeforms, but none seem any more enlightened than us. “It’s all so pointless / but it’s not though is it?” sings Smith, a line that seems to get at the album’s core. No matter how many jokes Smith cracks, The Overload bristles with rage at the state of the world. Though our existence may feel inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, we shouldn’t sink into nihilism. We should be angry at the bigotry and inequity that pervades modern life as well as the systems of power that enable it. It does matter that we stand for what is right, and that’s just what Yard Act do. They just never forget to laugh a bit along the way.