A soulless Newcastle-based venue plays host to one of the more spirited post-punk bands around. Yard Act has evolved their sound with the times and for third album You’re Gonna Need a Little Music sound like they’re playing fast and loose with the future. Their setlist is shuffled from night to night, a clear sign that the James Smith-fronted band are keen to show the variety their discography can offer, but it makes for some bold and rather brash choices. The Trenchcoat Museum, a song that feels like the build-up to a high point, is tucked away halfway through the NX setlist while the beautiful highs of 100% Endurance and The Overload, two classics from the band’s debut album, are cut into with Over the Barrel. It’s all about intense, interesting variation. It’s a blessing and a curse, but Yard Act lean into it as a messy madness that has them chase Fixer Upper with Fiction and take a leaf from Bob Dylan’s book, and not for the first time.
This constant setlist shake-up is an indication of what Smith and the band said a few months back when promoting You’re Gonna Need a Little Music. An audience doesn’t know what they want, and it’s up to the artist on stage to find out what they desire beyond the obvious. A cover of Daft Punk is Playing at My House, a tour exclusive for Newcastle according to Smith, is a staggering way to close the show. Lava La Rue joined Yard Act on stage for the LCD Soundsystem cover, a bizarre highlight that throws a unique spanner in the works. Smith and the band are in good form as ever, a few mixing troubles plague the set, but such is the case for every gig now. Something must be in the air. Smith spends a considerable period of this gig in the air, too, launching himself from a platform brought onto the stage. Jarvis Cocker had one of those at his Boiler Shop gig five years ago. The comparisons to the considered cultural commentators of the past continue.
Yard Act has done well to evolve from being just another band stating the obvious. It’s the age-old Stewart Lee bit, that an audience will “agree the fuck out of it” if they hear what they believe. Between changing up the setlist and finding a new, darker route through the likes of Dream Job and Dead Horse, Yard Act instil a freshness and fury in material that other, lesser bands, would’ve tucked away in favour of new music. You’re Gonna Need a Little Music dominates the set, but the band perform at such blistering speeds that they manage 18 songs for this Newcastle show. That spoken-word style, the wordplay that matches the exceptional guitar work from Sam Shipstone, is the very core of Yard Act as a band. It’s what makes them such an exciting live act.
They’re plagued a little by the mixing but that’s not the fault of the band. It makes A Vineyard for the North almost unidentifiable; another trick lifted from the Dylan playbook there. Not really, not there. Some of the Where’s My Utopia? and The Overload songs are performed with a slightly different tempo or rhythm to the lyrics, and it keeps that material fresh. The newer works are played a touch closer to the studio recording, for now. Yard Act are still a thrilling live experience; there isn’t anything quite like this band when it comes to the spoken-word style that actually settles in and ages well. There’s other, bigger bands who’ve profiled the world around them and, over time, their wording and phrases fall foul of aged pop culture references. But Smith has those in his lyrics; it’s all part of the charm. Sham 69 here, a bit of a nudge at the media cycle there. Yard Act are still in good form, a lively bunch with lots more to share.
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