On her NPR Monitor Mix blog, Carrie Brownstein has described YellowFever's sound as "haunted house surf music." I don't quite hear it, but I know what she's getting at: The Austin band plays a familiar sound just a half-twist skewed. It's familiar in the sense that you could as easily slot one of their catchy three-chord (if that) songs on the Moldy Peach-dominated Juno soundtrack as an International Pop Underground comp between Scrawl and the Spinanes, or on a circa-1982 John Peel playlist. And it's skewed in that almost none of the tracks on their self-titled long player are what they appear to be at first blush.
Peers like Vivian Girls (who've released YellowFever on their own Wild World label) may play girl-group pop drenched in noise, but their take on the tradition is otherwise reverential, couching love found/love lost themes in a standard verse-chorus-verse idiom. YellowFever, by contrast, use sly and subtle sound pastiches to spin their mostly shaggy dog (in one case, literally) yarns. "Donald", for example, initially reads like a diss track, as vocalists Jennifer Moore and Isabel Martin catcall, "You were such a perfect baby/ Now you've grown up old and lazy" like a couple of pissed off Shangri-Las. Yet they swipe the sing-songy chorus, "Donald don't you go/ Don't you go downtown" from 1963's Jaynetts track "Sally, Go 'Round the Roses", a sympathetic-ear song (the titular Sally is cautioned from going downtown where she'll see her guy stepping out with another girl). "Sally" folds so seamlessly into "Donald" that you barely notice that YellowFever's not only transposed genders, but shuffled emotional registers. Does Donald deserve to be pitied or persecuted? Either way, it makes for an intriguing song.
"Metarie" pulls a similar trick as its about-a-boy lyrics and garage-y organ sounds segue in the song's final seconds into Ben E. King's swishy 1961 hit "Spanish Harlem", forcing you to rewind and relisten to the YellowFever song as a riff on that ideologically compromised classic. Other incongruous details are less conceptual, like the surprising-- but entirely welcome-- surf guitar tones on the somber "Hellfire" or "Alice"'s gleeful, inscrutably worded coda: "Alice you've gone too far/ Howl with the howling dogs." (Turns out that last bit's a remnant of the original lyrics... about a golden retriever.)
What keeps these songs from being intellectually aloof inside baseball games? An organizing principle that assumes the musical past isn't so much a museum exhibit as an interactive theme park. Far from treating their influences as static taste markers, Yellow Fever assumes classic pop songs can form a dialogue with their own. Even when these conversations seem more whimsical than productive, it's fun to hear the band's imagination at work.
Besides, this is only their first LP-- or not even that. YellowFever assembles several earlier EPs and singles, going back to 2006. The collection's chronological sequencing makes it easy to track their sound's evolution-- from an ascetic mix of hand-in-glove harmonies paired with Adam Jones' throbbing bass, to the more sophisticated structures and confident vocals of "Culver City" and "Joe Brown". Fortunately, these last two, the band's most recent recordings, also own their best melodies. So even as YellowFever mature, they obviously aren't abandoning the playful catchiness that made them popular on Austin's club circuit in the first place.
