Yard Act, Where's My Utopia? (2024)
Release Date: March 1, 2024
Label: Island
Length: 43:19
Produced By: Yard Act, Remy Kabaka, Jr.
Rating: 8.6
Review by: Alexander Hellene
Highlights: “We Make Hits,” “The Undertow,” “Dream Job,” “Petroleum,” “Blackpool Illumination,” “A Vineyard for the North”
Imagine getting everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Now imagine instead of making you happy, it opens up a new box of hitherto unknown fears and anxieties. This will put you in the headspace of Yard Act frontman/songwriter James Smith after his band’s 2022 debut The Overload launched them to the forefront of the guitar-based music world as “post-punk’s latest poster boys,” to quote one of Where’s My Utopia?’s standout tracks “We Make Hits”:
Yeah, one night up in the attic, listening to Grammatics
Drinking cans and shooting the shit
We reeled off all of our hopes and dreams and made a list
And there was one singular ambition we had
That most musicians of our ilk aren't willing to admit
And it was to this mantra we would commitWe make hits
Two broke millennial men
And we'd do it again
Every night on the back of the bus
You know it ain't no fuss . . .
Who cares if your friends in the indie rock circuit think you’ve sold out; a guy’s got to eat, and so do his kids.1 While Smith asserts us he’s still “Anti-C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T,” he’s no chump. “We Make Hits,” the only song not solely penned by Smith—the other broke Millennial man is bassist Ryan Needham—underscores the practical reality that, in order to make it in the music world, you need to create something that’ll stick in people’s minds. “We Make Hits” is equal part history of the band and mission statement. And true to the song’s word, Yard Act are not “hook-dodgers.”
It is very self-aware. The whole album is.2 Yet Where’s My Utopia? is less an exploration of fame and more an exploration of how James Smith feels about suddenly being famous, how this can mess up your life. However, three things make Where’s my Utopia? stand out from the typical “rock star bitching about fame” fare we’ve been accustomed to seeing since the 1970s:
Instead of making the personal narcissistic, Smith nearly avoids solipsism altogether and does what all great artists do: make the personal universal;
Yard Act is English, and the English have a particular trait of using humor—a peculiar dark, biting, cynical, and often self-deprecating humor—in a way that is neither goofy nor too ironic, but helps reveal deeper truths; and
The music is really good.
Whereas the excellent The Overload is guitar-based post-punk (for lack of a better term), Where’s My Utopia? eschews the trappings of typical rock for something dancier, groovier, and weirder. This is saying something, as Yard Act, with Smith’s speak-singing poetry recital vocal delivery, unfashionable persona with the big glasses and the trenchcoat, and the band’s capacity to craft jittery, snaky, jagged tunes that get lodged in your brain with minimal effort was already pretty weird. But aided by Remi Kabaka, Jr., producer known for his work with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz, Smith and Needham, guitarist Sam Shipstone, and drummer Jay Russell have thrown together rock, punk, disco, rap, hip-hop, house, and musique concrete and sprinkled it liberally with anxiety. I mean, for the line “Welcome to the future, the paranoia suits you” from lead-off single “Dream Job,” Smith deserves plaudits as a great lyricist.3 But what does Yard Act sound like?
A glorious mess. It’s not the most original glorious mess—a lot of Where’s My Utopia? sounds like the kinds of things Franz Ferdinand were doing in the early 00s, and Blur and Beck were doing in the 1990s—but creativity is putting familiar things together in new ways. This, together with spastic production (interludes, samples, record scratches, and the splicing together disparate elements a la Frank Zappa or John Zorn) and Smith’s serious songwriting chops, helps elevate Where’s My Utopia? from the realm of imitation to art.
Yes, if you close your eyes, Smith could be mistaken for Damon Albarn at his drawliest, which is strange because Albarn is a born-and-bred Londoner while Smith is from Leeds, Yorkshire, with it’s, let’s say, unique accent. And yes, Smith shares Albarn’s piercing sense of observation, ironic distance, and musical curiosity. “Dream Job” kicks off with a tropical drum loop straight out of 1980s Miami before Needham lays down a sinister groove4 worthy of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). Smith lays down a deadpan recitation of the anxieties that come with signing to a subsidiary of Universal Inc. while trying not to sound like an ungrateful brat about it. The chorus, with it’s recitation of superlatives in steadily descending order of greatness (“It’s ace, top, mint, boss (that’s boss)/Class, sweet, dece, not bad”) is as brilliant as it is catchy,5 as is the Lionel Richie quoting of “Step into my office, all night long.” Add in Shipstone’s jagged, atonal guitar solo akin to Robert Fripp’s turn in Bowie’s “Fashion,” and you have more creativity in three minutes than many bands can muster in an album.
If there’s one knock on Where’s My Utopia? though is that it can sometimes feel overwhelming. But exhilaratingly so.
Take opener “An Illusion,” Smith’s lament to his young son that all he can bring back from tour is “a souvenir from every single city” he goes to.6 Where’s the utopia Smith promised his son, or promised to find himself? Nowhere. That’s literally what “utopia” means, and listening to Smith’s lyrics, one has to imagine he knows this as well. Musically, “An Illusion” vacillates from a rock band’s version of loping hip-hop with Smith’s deadpan delivery to a dreamier, harp-heavy chorus with female backing vocals.7 As with “Dream Job,” there’s a lot crammed in here, and coupled with the heavy subject matter, it makes the listener wonder if the entire album is going to be such a downer.
And it is, but it’s a downer that mostly sounds like a party with songs just long enough to not overstay their welcome but short enough that you wish they were longer.
Guilt is a throughline on Where’s My Utopia? “Down by the Stream” is driving groove with some fat bass as Smith recites a story about childhood adventures at the age of 13, culminating in a free-flowing confession and apology to his friend Jono Steadman for making fun of the way he talked due to a bout of childhood deafness caused by some “weird was build-up in his ears.”8 It’s confessional and raw, but it’s something we can all relate to—who hasn’t done mean things while young that are still regretted today? And “we were just kids” always feels like a cheap excuse, doesn’t it?
The fun continues with “The Undertow,” Casio pre-set bossa nova giving way to bouncing bass and 1960s spy-movie guitars. It’s another lament about Smith being away from his family, making the decision for them and wondering “What’s the guilt worth, if you do nothing with it?/What’s the guilt worth, if you choose when you feel it?” Smith uses this guilt as songwriting fuel, which makes him feel guiltier, an ouroboros, another cycle of abuse. Ditto with “When the Laughter Stops,” featuring Katy J. Pearson’s sassy turn in the chorus: “Don't let no one ever know about the burden that you're smuggling . . .” The music business is cruel, our fears and insecurities turned into music for others’ voyeuristic enjoyment. But Smith chose this life, and he’s not making any excuses: “For when we go back to our proper jobs and realize the laughter's stopped,” he sings, “I need to know my chance was fully blown.”
Not every song hits so hard. “Fizzy Fish” is a bit of a slog that lacks the emotional punch of Where’s My Utopia?’s best. And while “We Make Hits” is catchy and funny, it lacks the bite of “Dream Job” or rocker “Grifter’s Grief,” whose coda proves that Yard Act could do a credible job with hardcore punk. Too many songs just sort of end abruptly in a sample from an old TV broadcast or radio show, or Smith’s voice being pitch-shifted downward; it’s the Monty Python syndrome of knowing how to write every part of a skit except the ending. That said, the gradual incorporation of Macbeth’s famous monologue9 at the end of “When the Laughter Stops” is particularly effective, given the song’s subject matter.
Even Smith’s professional life comes under the microscope: “Petroleum” deals with Smith’s admission at a 2023 show in Bognor Regis that, burned out from touring and trying to deliver something new each night on stage, he just didn’t want to be there (“No, I could never begin (he could never begin)/Oh, I could never tell you how I’m feeling, if I’m not feeling it”). The song, with its processed drums and bass-led verses, explodes into a mid-tempo chorus with Shipstone delivering a descending guitar10 line echoed by Smith and tinkling chimes. Instead of writing a double-album rock opera about it, Smith wisely sticks on one song.11
However, the true emotional core of Where’s My Utopia? arrives in its final two songs. The penultimate “Blackpool Illuminations” is less a song than a spoken reminiscence/therapy session set to sunny guitar chords, skirling flutes, and other production touches that shift along with Smith’s narrative of visiting the titular lights festival when he was six, getting injured, and how that young age is when one feels “most in love with your parents.” It’s a touching, vulnerable story, walking through Smith’s eventual disenchantment with the festival, an experience hearing music at the Illuminations while a pilled-up teenager, and then bringing his own son years later. Here is where he finally finds perfection, the closest thing he’ll ever get to utopia, his “beautiful family” and “dream job [that’s] no longer a dream,” wondering, in the face of what is truly important, why he spent so much energy worrying about what “wankers would think of album two?” Where’s My Utopia? closes with “A Vineyard for the North,” a gorgeous meditation on preserving what one has while the world goes mad around you. But nothing lasts forever, not even bizarre art-punk albums about how bizarre it is to be in an art-punk band for a living.
Where’s My Utopia?
An Illusion
We Make Hits
Down by the Stream
The Undertow
Dream Job
Fizzy Fish
Petroleum
When the Laughter Stops
Grifter’s Grief
Blackpool Illuminations
A Vineyard for the North
Fatherhood and family is one of the themes running through Where’s My Utopia?, Smith having a toddler son.
I haven’t even gotten to their excellent music videos, all of which feature a loosely connected story involving a girl in a trenchcoat.
The album’s first line, “It's a bank holiday, so all the hospitals are shut/Guess I'll have to saw off my own foot” is also fantastic.
Most of these songs sound built from the bass up, which is to their benefit.
Lyricists will always get points from me for internal rhymes.
I start self-destructing
Buying fridge magnets everywhere I went
To prove I’ve been
It’s fucking disgusting
Look at this
A cactus in a snap-back riding a BMX atop bubble lettering that reads “Venice”
“An Illusion” also features a typically poignant chorus:
I’m in love with an illusion
Once the wheels are in motion
Swear I’ll join the revolution
The denouement is particularly chilling:
I was young, but more so I was wrong
And I swear down, if I found out my own son had been picking on someone
Well, when he came home from school
I’d grab that little fucker by his rucksack
Pin him up to the wall and scream in his face
Until he'd never dare make another person feel shitty at all‘Cause they picked on me too, so I know, same as you
That the pain never really goes away
It just finds new places to hide inside the darkest nooks and crannies of your brain
Again and again
It surprises you every time you find itThe old cycle of abuse
He did it to me, so I’ll do it to you
And it don't matter if you're tough as old boots
There's no margin for error in this world
There's absolutely no excuse
Though the very fibers of our being are frayed to the point of exhaustion for a bit of harmless fun
Jesus Christ, I never meant to hurt anyone
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death
Out, out, brief candle
Life’s but a walking shadow
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more
It is a tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
With some tapping, the mad lad.
No shade on Roger Waters, though, whose own self-loathing at his on-stage behavior led to the brilliant The Wall.