Oh No Ono - Yes (Morningside)
5/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
Having lived with this album for a month you'd think I'd have it down by now; the greater aspects of whether it's good or bad, that basic question answered with some degree of accuracy... but this is such a bewildering mesh of quirky 80's dark pop, psychedelia, David Bowie nightmares and mid-Beatles confusion, you're never quite sure what page you're on, and once you do the Danish collective change the book.
Not that we're saying this is a downfall; far, far from it in fact. With so many bands sticking to the three minute indie-pop song it's great that some, though worryingly few, still make albums like this. Albums so off the wall you put it somewhere between Prince and Steven Hawking's 'A Brief History Of Time' under the banner 'huh?'.
For all the moments that you think you're being lost by almost random patterns of weirdness, the anarchic mayhem that most of Yes pushes as standard, there are stupidly catchy melodies that Oh No Ono seem to have an endless supply of. And when a song really is starting to sound like a Sesame Street conceived jazz-tune from the mid 1980's, they pull an exasperatingly catchy chorus out of their magic bag and away we go again; floundering in their electric circus that's full of neon clown facades and intimidating other-dimensional acrobatics; like Beck joining the Power Rangers and taking advantage of Zordon's interplanetary machinery while playing every copy of 'Reproduction' in existence backwards, concurrently.
At their best times this is John Lennon's heyday, at their worst though it's almost pointless noise for the sake of it, like a downhearted child braking a keyboard into pieces, making sound as he does so. But all the quintessentially useless moments make it even more endearing; giving it value that otherwise it may be short of. It's the confusing benevolence of this album which makes it so utterly, doubtlessly exciting and possibly one of the most vital instrumentational journeys you'll ever take without the use of psychotropic substances. Doesn't that sound exciting? F*ck yeah!
Stream four tracks from Yes HERE.
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