Down I Go

“Fretless bass”
“Smooth operator”
“Dude, they are actually awesome”

Propped against a wall, proper-glass pint in one hand (go downstairs – those plastic cup things are almost as awful as the actual beer in ‘em) and mobile phone in the other, I’m relaying first, second and third impressions to another DiS writer. Yeasayer haven’t been here before, but they’re making the most of their debut visit to London – tonight marks the first of the Brooklyn-spawned four-piece’s seven shows in this nation’s capital. The Barfly crowd gradually shuffles forward as songs turn to tribal dances of celebration, hands aloft and clapped together like thunder, percussion a rippling and persuasive melody that infects our veins like rage made outta candy-coated rainbows.

They’re seeing something special and, three songs in, they realise it.

All members shout and scream and holler in unison and one after the other; it’s a vocal circle, with keys depressed to trigger wandering rhythms and all manner of shakers employed to skitter about each song’s core like leaping leprechauns tap-dancing around the pot they guard so haphazardly. It’s like seeing Animal Collective for the first time – an experience that so neatly transcends the regular show about town, with such a natural and organic feel to everything, that one is immediately baffled as to how this band pulls this off night after night. Perhaps they don’t: perhaps we’re special, right-place right-time sorts who’ve caught Yeasayer on great form. Or, this is a set plagued by nerves. If so, the remaining London shows are do-not-miss events to be cherished in the memory long after the quartet fly homewards.

The half-hour set is peppered with songs sure to become classics of their kind once the debut album arrives in October. ‘Wintertime’ is a slow-churning epic of eastern rhythms and contemporary freak-folk-isms – it’s like Entrance possessed by some sort of Metal Guru; ‘2080’, meanwhile, is a chant-along unlike anything these senses have been subjected to in 2007 – it’s out on seven-inch next week and comes double-thumbs-up recommended based on this rendering.

And yes: fretless bass, and not masturbatory in the slightest. Well, sort of – but it’s tolerated, this indulgence, when the end product the constituent parts create is so wonderfully enveloping. Actually awesome.

Catch Yeasayer for zero pennies at this Saturday's DiScover Club - details here.