RECORD REVIEW: Yek Koo “Love Song for the Dead C” (Emerald Cocoon)

                This is my second venture into the sounds of Yek Koo and I don’t’ think there is any more perfect place to do this than on vinyl, and yeah, I realize I’m big on cassettes but vinyl and Yek Koo just seems like a perfect fit.    A lot of this record has the same overall idea of there being static and electric guitar riffs, yet there are also these distant vocals in the background singing or screaming, possibly pleading.    Some songs take turns in other noise directions but that seems to be the blueprint.

                Through jazz horns, bass drum beats, electro loops and pots and pans noise, “Love Song for the dead C” somehow maintains a sense of harmony.   In the third song particularly it becomes quite dreamy, with trippy guitar and vocals.   For this song- and perhaps this song only- I can hear this Yek Koo record as sounding like a cross between something from Blind Melon and Yoko Ono, which would be quite a pair to have collaborate if Shannon Hoon was still alive. 

                The songs are looming, they are dinging, banging, building and clanking.  They are a lot of verbs that I’m used to seeing on television shows my two year old would watch, something like Bob the Builder.   But above everything else, the best way to describe is by simply saying that it is audio poetry.  It’s not the Beat movement by any means—it is something more current and much more engaging.