"Dentist drill" is an easy comparison to reach for when describing how a noise-rock guitar sounds. But listen to the final seconds of "Across The Horizon", the final track from the Omaha band Yuppies' self-titled record, and it seems pretty clear guitarist/vocalist Jack Begley wants to eliminate the possibility that we'd think about anything else. Torquing and choking his strings, he wrings out an insistent neener-neener that uncannily mimics the drill's blank, skull-boring insistence. The song isn't much more than a minute, but it lingers uncomfortably, a leering face caught in a crowd.
Yuppies, an Omaha band whose members graduated from high school in 2007, are really good at generating bad feelings. Their terrific full-length, a mixture of no wave anarchy, post-punk lockstep, and the way the two wrestle with and interrupt each other, explores a range of them. The band is signed to Dull Tools, the label run by Parquet Courts' Andrew Savage, and there are similarities: Begley mutters and shouts with the same dyspeptic unease. But the shit-eating grin is still always visible in Parquet Courts, where Yuppies mostly make me think of someone's overly tense neck muscles. "All right, all right, we're going for a ride, whether you like it or not," Begley tells you in "A Ride". Then, when the doors lock, he turns to you and shrieks, forcefully.
Yuppies is a tight, white-knuckled, and genuinely unpredictable record. The band recorded the entire first half of it in one long live take, and the nerviness of the endeavor is palpable. Songs don't start or end, they just roll right over each other, thrashing like fevered limbs in sweaty bedsheets. "Across the Prairies", the queasy, slow-moving intro, lurches into a frantic little "Lust For Life" tarantella in "A Ride" before colliding into a squealing wall of free-jazz saxophone that skids immediately into "What's That?". "Easy Nights" seems to interrupt itself and settle back down every 13 seconds or so. If you are accustomed to listening to Wire albums as one long, glowering run-on sentence, never bothering to confirm the title of the minute-long scrap you're currently hearing, than you'll probably settle into the rhythm of Yuppies quickly.
"I'm beginning to feel detached and a bit unstable, I just seem to get awfully mindful/ I swallowed an anchor the other day and almost drowned in the bathtub," the Yuppies' other vocalist Noah Sterba gulps on "I Don't Know". His black-comedic monologuing is tremendously satisfying to shout along to: "LIVE A LIFE OF EXCESS!" he screeches on "What's That?", and his voice scrapes a note somewhere just south of "Scentless Apprentice"'s "Go away-EEEE!" The band fires off an appropriate sardonic little gesture for each lyric, like the curdled little cabaret riff, matched by a honking harmonica in unison, on "Right Now", or the violin sawing rustily, right on top of the bridge for maximum-scrunch, on "I Don't Know". The peak of the drama, and the longest sustained major-key stretch, dawns right when Begley realizes that "Not every word has to rhyme/ Not everything has to be in time." It's a brief, exultant moment of before the band acts on the manifesto and descends again, joyfully, into chaos.
