YUCK: One Word Can Say So Much

It’s tempting to say YUCK suck like a truck stuck in the muck, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair (although incredibly clever). It’s just that the London-based outfit’s self-titled debut sounds like they’ve been isolated in a college dorm room surrounded by nothing but Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth albums, with someone occasionally ordering Chinese take-out and a Teenage Fanclub cassette.  Led by guitar-vocalist wunderkinds Daniel Blumberg and Max Bloom, formerly teamed as indie-pop press darlings Cajun Dance Party, YUCK never met a line of soaring, distorted feedback and hazy vocalization it didn’t like. It’s so derivative at times you can almost hear J. Mascis dialing up his copyright lawyer (if he wasn’t paralyzed by lethargy). The ‘90s time warp extends to the video for “Holing Out,” with its lo-tech psychedelic lighting, negative exposure sequence, slackeroid stances, and vague hairy-beast-chasing-a-blonde-in-the-snow-carnage. Maybe they should’ve called it “A London Werewolf in America.”

The second half of the album does ease off the distortion pedal for a number of songs, with relatively ballad-esque tracks like “Stutter,” Sunday” and “Suck” (their title, not mine). But then there’s ”Rose Gives a Lilly,” an instrumental that sounds like somebody left the tape running while the band was tuning up. The wall of noise fever-dream finale “Rubber” builds like a bunch of kids who’ve locked themselves in a Guitar Center outlet after-hours and can’t quite figure out what all those knobs are for. (They had it remixed by Mogwai – no nineties guitar fetish there, right?) The lyrics, when not buried in the mix, seem to mostly deal with early 20-something relationship type-stuff that probably felt really heavy after one too many English Lit classes.

Blumberg and Bloom (what, he couldn’t afford a “burg”?) are probably nice Jewish boys. Heck, they recruited drummer Jonny Rogoff from a kibbutz in Israel (BTW, Rogoff manages to connect YUCK to current indie rock in that he sports both a beard AND a healthy Jew-fro, but he’s from Jersey, so that might explain it. Bassist Mariko Doi is from Hiroshima, but it’s never too late to convert). It’s just that YUCK have nothing new to say and they say it loud. Maybe with some luck and pluck and if they don’t forget to duck, YUCK will make a fast buck. Otherwise, just replace the “Y” with an “F,” add an "ed" at the end and move on.