James Yuill- Turning Down Water for Air Album Review
James Yuill signed with Moshi Moshi Records, quite an impressive resume with such great talent coming out of this label such as Hot Chip, Lykke Li, Bloc Party, and one of my new favourites Friendly Fires. To say I had high expectations for James Yuill and his album Turning Down Water for Air would be a bit of an understatement as I am an avid fan of both Folk and Electronic (Folktronica, clever isn’t it?) music and found that Yuill did a decent job at blending these two genres.
I couldn’t help but draw similarities to The Postal Service, Fishcherspooner, and Radio Head (and oddly brokeback mountain on his first track You Always Do). While comparisons have been made to Justice, Yuill for me couldn’t be further from electro simply because the songs are so calming and are lacking the heavy bass line every good electro song needs. Yuills album is full of melodic acoustic guitar rifts and soothing vocals, really perfect for putting in your headphones and taking a bike ride through a park on a nice day. His album started out kinda slow with You Always Do and really started to pick up right away with the second track Left Handed Girl followed by one of my other favourites No Pins Allowed (am I the only person who hears a bit of crystal castles here?) Starting his album with such fast upbeat music was a real mistake in my opinion because it got me in the mood to listen to some fun music, but he quickly made a 180 with his next tracks and never really got my attention from then on in as they were all very slow with a lot more guitar, monotone vocals, and les electronic influence, but I must say when in the right mood the second half of the album can be exactly my tatste. Overall Yuill produced a strong album but I cant help but feel like its missing something, I\m not a music major just a music lover so I cant say exactly what this is, just that something was missing.
3/5 stars
Official Myspace
Official Website
Left Handed Girl by James Yuill
No Pins Allowed by James Yuill
Tags: album
