Odd Blood

Yeasayer - Odd Blood
Critic Score
Based on 37 reviews
2010 Ratings: #110 / 924
Year End Rank: #18
User Score
Based on 158 ratings
2010 Rank: #177
Liked by 7 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
NOW Magazine

Hopefully there’s still enough room on people’s psych plates for Odd Blood, a masterful follow-up that deserves to get into your ears.

91
A.V. Club

Odd Blood is every bit as dense as its predecessor, with every inch of space teeming with exhausting polyrhythmic detail and time-warped synth sounds. Yeasayer is still adept at filtering primal emotions through the complex circuits of the future; it’s just that that future looks a lot brighter than it used to.

90
God Is in the TV
The comparison to Animal Collective is a justifiable one, both are experimental alternative bands driven towards creating brand new sounding material, both are brilliant.
90
Beats Per Minute
Even the sequencing is expert: if the second half feels like a downer after the sensory overload of its first half, it soon reveals itself to be of immeasurable depth. All of this might seem a bit hyperbolic, but an album like this is designed — nay, engineered — to produce this sort of reaction. It deserves nothing less.
80
Uncut

Odd Blood comes a cropper at times, but mostly this is an involving album of vivid weirdo pop.

80
The Guardian
Not so much a step-up, but a masterclass in modern, multicultural, weirdo pop music, Yeasayer's second album is both odd and bloody marvellous.
80
Billboard

Between the folds of intricate sound on Odd Blood float Yeasayer members Anand Wilder's and Chris Keating's expressive vocal harmonies, giving this seemingly disparate, indefinable music a clear identity.

80
Mojo
Willfully odd, beautifully hypnotic and with a wonderful lightness of touch: a straw poll of the office drew comparisons to Flaming Lips, Arcade Fire and Take That.
80
Slant Magazine

The feverish approach lends Odd Blood a slithering lo-fi ecstasy, elevating it beyond the similarly buzzing, synth-infused efforts of Yeasayer's peers.

80
Rolling Stone
The result is simultaneously stranger and poppier, more celebratory and more serious.
80
Q Magazine
More accessible than Animal collective, weirder than MGMT, this is otherworldly pop music to make the head spin.
80
Evening Standard
It's all supremely hummable with enough weirdness still going on in the margins to keep the beard-stroking hipsters on side.
80
American Songwriter

The fact that these guys can expand their sound and still feel entirely comfortable in their own specific framework, much less top themselves a second time around, is proof enough that Yeasayer are one of the best at what they do.

80
musicOMH

Yeasayer’s wit and inventiveness always manages to avoid any kind of descent into cliché.

80
AllMusic

Odd Blood’s emphasis on genre-mashing can overwhelm the weaker tunes, whose melodies are sometimes less interesting than the arrangements themselves, but the album has enough highlights to outweigh any filler on side B.

80
NME
Yeasayer’s greatest achievement is their balancing act, teetering between heartfelt and overly earnest, between invoking and pastiching past decades, between worldly experimentalism and token tourism.
80
SPIN

The biggest, boldest, and best moments on their second album nod flamboyantly to influences never before evident — Erasure (“Ambling Alp”) and Haircut 100 (the tropical “O.N.E.”), among others — but somehow they’re seamlessly integrated with trippier old jams.

70
Drowned in Sound

Maaaaybe Odd Blood isn’t quite the hive of unfathomably exotic treats that a few of the tracks might have initially suggested.

70
Tiny Mix Tapes

Odd Blood is an album whose highs are higher than its lows are low; those valleys are, however, still very much present.

70
PopMatters
It’s not what Yeasayer once was, and who cares? They have avoided the sophomore slump the only way they know how: by fearlessly dismantling everything that made their debut a safe bet.
70
XLR8R

With Odd Blood, the Brooklyn trio has left behind its most obvious ethnic influences—and its environmental anxiety—for a tighter, more polished sound.

70
Clash
It’s an unabashed pop record that anyone should be proud to play at full volume.
70
Under the Radar
A full half of the album completely works. Congratulating a band on their improvement may seem a bit condescending, but Yeasayer's figuring it out.
65
Prefix

Throughout its padded 40-minute run time (like All Hour Cymbals, it’s got a decent amount of filler), Odd Blood makes a stronger case for what’s up next for the band’s sound than where it is now.

61
Pitchfork

A tighter, slicker, poppier sophomore album tries on every imaginable sound and style-- but none is as original or effective as the one they started with.

60
No Ripcord

The more tastefully formulated tracks just can’t offset the profusion of soppy lyricism and the tedium of weaker songs. Ultimately, Odd Blood reads as a well-informed but poorly executed homage to the ‘80s.

60
The Independent
The resulting eclectic confections threaten to spiral off into cosmic nonsense, but remain anchored in pop territory by the solid drumming of top session man Jerry Marotta.
60
The Telegraph

For all their promise, Yeasayer are still possibly a touch too clever-clever in their structure and rhythms for the mainstream.

60
The Skinny

With Odd Blood, Yeasayer earn their stripes as indie-pop innovators, but they would surely benefit from exercising just a tad more control over their wild, conflicting urges.

58
Coke Machine Glow

An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise, Odd Blood heads in every direction at once.

TheBravesDH
89

We couldn't have asked for better singles to start off the new decade than Ambling Alp and ONE.

xcomebackkid
86

Falling face first in an audio acid trip through time and space. Clear influnces of tears for fears and depeche mode but combined with a sparkly electronic indian infused sound. This album has a little bit for every listener.

1Spooked0gHosT7
88

Schools(h)out-houRest.

1Spooked0gHosT7
88

Schools(h)out-houRest.

xcomebackkid
86

Falling face first in an audio acid trip through time and space. Clear influnces of tears for fears and depeche mode but combined with a sparkly electronic indian infused sound. This album has a little bit for every listener.

TheBravesDH
89

We couldn't have asked for better singles to start off the new decade than Ambling Alp and ONE.

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