Sunday, January 14, 2007

Yello: You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess (1983)


Yello: 'Lost Again' (1983)


Yello: 'I Love You' (1983)

I've now been listening to Yello's remastered 1983 album You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess. Yello, the ingenious synthpop duo of Boris Blank (b. 1952) and Dieter Meier (b. 1945) (the third member, Carlos Peron, stayed with Yello until 1983) was in their 1980s heyday known for their extremely eclectic approach (being probably a bit too obvious, I shudder to use the term "postmodern" here...), combining to electronic sounds Latin rhythms and other yesteryear lounge music-type exotica (perhaps Angelo Badalamenti's jazzy moods for David Lynch's works would come close here), night club torch songs, film noir melodrama and offbeat humour with outlandish narratives, making Yello's music unlike any other synthpop act of the day's futurist/New Romantic wave; still sounding fresh today in comparison to many of their contemporaries. Yello originates from Switzerland, the country which also gave us Carl Gustav Jung, Hermann Hesse, LSD (which Albert Hoffman synthesized in Sandoz Laboratories in 1938), and H.R. Giger, the artist behind Alien designs and his hellish airbrush visions. Something odd in the water in the cuckoo-clock country...?

  • More Yello videos @ YouTube
  • Listen to Yello @ MySpace
  • 1 comment:

    Juri said...

    Yes - I've been a bit angry with me for taking the "You Gotta Say Yes" to a second-hand store some years back.