Yard Act - Where’s My Utopia? Review

Leeds' based band of brothers deliver a sophomore laced with expressive gasps and existential jibes. All the while thriving for a fun record filled with ambition. It's comically Yard Act to a tee. 

Ever since The Overload fell into our laps, many placed Yard Act as one of the most successful indie stories of the decade. Adept in panache and style, the quartets' post-punk sprinklings of sonic workings-out and quizzical spoken poetry comes out in full display once more with a second that seemingly was just too hard to do, following such a formulated pattern of success from the first.

But, with both communal spirit and confidence fuelling their music musings, we're left with a follow-up that is far more playful, far more expansive in pushing the boat out sonically. Certainly compared to that of their pandemic-stifled debut, Where's My Utopia? has been born out of what makes a project like this really sing. As it stands a testament to the bands' four-way chemistry, the lot of them can cook with the all the right amount of ingredients.

At the crux of the album, an existential question is posed. With it, comes varying degrees of grief, guilt and ambition. Almost symbiotically, the album is packed to the rafters with a real broad range of tastes, as if these incessant list of questions are laid out on the instruments before them. 

For progress, sometimes you have to look backwards to go forwards. With it, The Illusion traipses into Yard Act's older history of inundated pessimism before we're jarred into the exciting chapters of collaboration. A swaggering love-letter to the buzz of creating, irrespective of the outcome - "and we just wanna have some some fun before we're sunk" - comes We Make Hits.The jarring bones-heavy of Down The Stream is a pensive childhood trauma while The Undertow draws on space and restrain from trendsetters Pulp, as a hypnotic bassline is fed in between dancing strings. At the heart of it, is James conveying the decision to leave his family at home all the while following his dream on the road, as he repeats in himself, "What's the guilt worth?"

The sardonic stylings of Ian Dury-esque Dream Job bites into the piss-poor qualities of the music industry, as Smith struggles to convince himself that everything's ace. The funky percussion and swanky bassline adds to the peeling commentary; resulting in a equally compelling return to the top.

Fizzy Fish is matched with the same slice of creative oddity - dolphin calls in the hook were recorded in Jay's attic - laced with an authoritarian swagger, safe in the knowledge that these guys know exactly what they're doing. Petroleum is another bass-led narrative giving swathing context to the engulfed skeleton on the LP artwork - "It's not a sign that the embers of passion are dying / My bones burn / And the brain that's controlling them" - aswell as stories on the road that went a little south. “I lost it with the crowd in Bognor Regis and told them I was bored and I didn’t want to be there,” James recalls. “Me and Ryan had a row after, and Ryan rightly dressed me down for the way I acted. It got me pondering the idea that, now this is a job, what are the requirements of it? People think they want honesty but they don’t, they want me to portray the version of honesty that they've paid to see and that’s part of the illusion.”

Fellow indie-storyteller Katy J Pearson joins the boys on melody-heavy When the Laughter Stops while Grifter's Grief is very much a creators' toy-box of party tricks - synth motifs, sporadic horns - before it lifts off into a full frontal force of heavy punk-rock.

The album is then finalised with a one-two of Smith's best narratives to date. Blackpool Illuminations is a 7-minute knockout of four lads with a brotherly bond devoted solely to the cause of the project, as it takes a sonic leap in instrumental contours. A real delightful surprise on an otherwise expected slot for filler. A Vineyard for the North, meanwhile, takes a leaf out of the debut by seeing the bigger picture. “I read that French vineyards had started buying up land in the south of England because of climate change, and that’s quite a terrifying thing,” James notes, “but then there’s the idea that new things will grow in the soil that couldn’t grow before, and there are unknowns and we’ll adapt because we’re an adaptable species. Uncertainty is the best hope we have now. But our lives were never set in stone, and no creature in the history of existence's future has ever been guaranteed. I have to hope. For me, and for my son.”