The music of Brooklyn's Yeasayer is an eclectic, genre-bending journey into pop, rock, Middle Eastern and African musics, folk, and dub. Vocalist/keyboardist Chris Keating and vocalist/guitarist Anand Wilder were both raised in Baltimore, where they honed their vocal skills in a barbershop quartet and played in a high-school band, Sic Transit, before leaving town to attend different colleges. Years later, the two relocated to New York and began shaping the project that would soon become Yeasayer. Wilder's cousin, Ira Wolf Tuton, joined as the group's bassist, and drummer Luke Fasano was the last member to climb aboard in May 2006.

OFFICIAL SITE  ::  FACEBOOK  ::  TWITTER  ::  SECRETLY CANADIAN

The band set to work on recording its debut album, All Hour Cymbals, which was unveiled to much critical acclaim (not to mention a healthy blogosphere buzz) in October 2007. International tour dates and festival appearances followed, during which the band honed its blend of live instrumentation and prerecorded samples. When it came time to record a second album, Yeasayer traveled to Woodstock, NY, and rented out the country home of percussionist Jerry Marotta. The resulting record, Odd Blood, appeared in early 2010 and showcased a different side of the band, with synthetic sounds and dance-inspired production playing a much larger role.

Yeasayer will be releasing their new album, Fragrant World, on August 21, 2012 via Secretly Canadian. “We definitely try to capture the schizophrenia of what it’s like to be alive today,” says Yeasayer's co-frontman/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder. Fragrant World is inspired in part by such dystopian stories as Blade Runner, but it is also a dense, ambitious, thoroughly modern, and complicated pop record. “I listened to a lot of R&B records while we were making this,” co-frontman/multi-instrumentalist Chris Keating explains. “I wanted to make a record that was legitimately, to use a bad word, funky. Listening to Teddy Pendergrass and then Aaliyah records. Something that legitimately has a sway to it, tempos I call mid-tempo come-ons, BPM ranges that you’re seeing in more R&B kind of stuff and some really sub-y bass tones. But there’s nothing more broadly conceptual than that." Fragrant World was recorded in their native Brooklyn. Thanks to a recommendation from Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin, they recorded at the Brooklyn studio of indie label Mexican Summer, renting the space for two months and venturing a few blocks away to Plantain Studios to work for a short stretch with Abe Seiferth, renowned for his collaborations with DFA artists.