REVIEW: Yard Act – Where’s My Utopia?

It’s a tale as old as time. You dream and toil and strive, and finally you get the thing you always wanted. And your personal utopia… is nowhere to be found. Instead you have a new set of problems. And the old ones – they’re still with you, my friend. Your dream isn’t going to solve everything. James Smith, the wordy raconteur who fronts Yard Act, has fulfilled this destiny of adulthood. And across his band’s second album, he explores the many themes that keep him up at night in his new life as a successful musician: the familial guilt, the haunting events from childhood, the fear of losing everything. Across the album’s 11 wildly varying tracks, his mental state often resembles the figure engulfed in flames on the album’s cover.

I reviewed Yard Act’s debut for this site almost exactly two years ago, and I thought it was ok. Smith’s often rambling delivery was in turn witty and engaging, smug and annoying. But regardless of this, what held the album back was a rather pedestrian musicality. A kind of alt-rock-by-numbers spirit undercut even the better songs, apart from the more ambitious and interesting ‘Tall Poppies’ – a longer track that strayed from the script with genuine emotional resonance and expanded instrumentation. I hoped their future would feature more songs like this, but the record as a whole was uninspiring.

I feel very differently about this one. Within a minute of ‘An Illusion’, the opener on Where’s My Utopia?, it is unequivocally clear that we are in different territory here. A device being booted up, a disembodied voice sampled from the ether, and Smith running straight into tales from the road, before the whole thing is cut off by a melancholy keyboard riff that descends into the chorus. “I’m in love with an illusion,”  Smith sings, wistfully. “When the wheels are in motion, swear I’ll join the revolution.” As guitar strings sadly reverberate around him, it’s striking just how much more fleshed out this music sounds already. 

‘An Illusion’ is far from the only example of the great strides the band has made musically. ‘Down By The Stream’ begins as a guitar and drum-led recollection of childhood misadventure, but as Smith struggles to maintain the jaunty mood amid Jay Russell’s clattering drums, the percussion sharply cuts away to an ominous atmosphere, a sombre apology to a wronged friend delivered in flat, regretful tones. The effect is powerfully evocative; it feels as if we’re there with Smith, as the “sharks circle” in his mind, staring at his ceiling in the early hours. Elsewhere, several songs embrace much poppier and danceable music, which works as a welcome contrast to the tone of the lyrics.  ‘Dream Job’ and ‘We Make Hits’ have proper singalong hooks, while ‘Grifter’s Grief’, with its sparkling keyboard refrain sounds like something from Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach – something that makes sense when you consider producer Remi Kabaka Jr is a member of Damon Albarn’s band.

Those latterly mentioned songs share lyrical themes around the fear of losing this newfound success. There’s a shakiness that underlies the humour that they make hits as “broke millennial men” or the repeated superlatives that insist that their participation in the problematic music industry is all roses. The Katy J Pearson-assisted ‘When The Laughter Stops’ directly addresses the need the band feel to “know [their] chance was fully blown” when their downfall inevitably comes. When the lyrics take this angle of personal honesty as opposed to the societal cynicism of the first album, it feels much more effective and engaging. The danceable sound adds to this; it almost sounds as though they’re desperately trying to keep us on the dancefloor so that we can’t bring them down.

Where’s My Utopia? is bookended by highlights. Much of the musical exploration and sharpest lyrics lie in the aforementioned opening songs, and while midsection songs like ‘The Undertow’, ‘Petroleum’ and ‘Grifter’s Grief’ are smartly put together and enjoyable, they don’t quite match the opening salvo. On repeated listens, I found myself waiting for the weightier songs of the finale.

It’s not simply the intimacy of the storytelling that makes ‘Blackpool Illuminations’ so impressive, nor the way the instrumentation builds in layers. It’s the overall song construction – the way these elements are weaved together to create a moment of great emotional catharsis that you don’t quite realise we were building towards. Hidden within that seemingly rhetorical question in the album’s title is a personal answer, and through delicately plucked guitar, a story delivered between deadpan speaking and half-rhyming, and a string-laden finale, we get a hell of a pay-off. Smith moves from his own childhood to that of his young son’s and in the process realises that “the unknown is the only true hope for a brighter future”. As a composition, it’s quite the achievement.

And it’s a masterstroke to follow this emotional big-hitter by returning to the dancefloor with ‘A Vineyard For The North’. This is the disco at the end of the night, a celebratory embrace of whatever the future brings. It functions as a bold full stop on an album which, as its artwork suggests, is more colourful, more musical, and more weighty than its predecessor. I underestimated this rabble. At the end of his Blackpool reminiscence, Smith asks why he wondered “what wankers would think of album two.” Well sir, this wanker thinks it’s a triumph.

Words by Tom Burrows