Fragrant World by Yeasayer

The songs throughout Fragrant World are arrestingly forward-thinking without shying away from invoking music's rich pageantry.

Although it does eventually get going, Fragrant World seems to take quite a while before you get to the gooey caramel centre

This is a record of adventure and texture, an attempt, musically, to conjure up a future we may never actually have. 

Fragrant World is a sexy, infectious compilation of conventional musical tropes, filtered through Yeasayer’s dark kaleidoscope.

Fragrant World finds Yeasayer confidently trimming the hedges and tweaking their sonic parameters, with modest success.

It’s no stinker, more a transition, a typical third LP that just doesn’t catch light enough. 

Fragrant World’s lack of fun songs gives the band nowhere to play

The grooves and the sonic wizardry work, but Fragrant World doesn’t have half of the intensity, innovation, or memorable hooks of the group’s two prior LPs.

Despite giving themselves over to a completely pointless ideal, Yeasayer soar with sublime choruses that are everything that pop has been trying to realize

Instead of an album hurtling 100mph in one of those directions, ‘Fragrant World’ feels like the work of a band with stabilisers on. 

As a listening experience it's not spectacular, furious or even that odd, just reassuringly reliable, although the ingredients are starting to smell a bit off.     

Unlike the erratic, occasionally captivating, and always bold Odd Blood, Fragrant World rests in a tentative middle ground. 

In the end, much of Fragrant Blood seems significantly less exotic than their bygone pop tunes.

If we could compare albums and chairs for a moment, it seems that this album is more cheap plastic and shiny veneer than it is a relic of tattered wood.

It is to Yeasayer's great credit that they continually manage to make fresh, unfamiliar music that sounds terrible. 

Man, I've been a big fan of Yeasayer and still listen to both their first two albums, but this was an unfortunate miss for me.