Yello - Point (2020)

Yello-Album is a sounding journey into the blue. We know where the journey begins, but we have no idea where it will end. That's always been the case, and it's no different with the latest litter, called "Point"

Dieter Meier and Boris Blank - a songwriter duo as it could have been invented by Hergé (Tim & Struppi). One of them, Blank, is in a dream, the melodies come to him, which plunge the other, Meier, into a frenzy that makes him hammer wild Dada stories into the typewriter. One, Blank, is most comfortable in the den of his studio. The other one, Meier, travels the world in seven-league boots. They've been making music together for forty years. There's not a trace of wisdom in their old age

"Point" was created in exactly the same way as the thirteen albums before and the evergreen popular songs "Oh Yeah", "The Race" or "The Rhythm Divine". "I compare our music with visual worlds," says Blank. "I'm a sound painter who's always working in his studio." In joyful detail work he arranges the sound colours - in the meantime he can fall back on hundreds of thousands of stored beats, melody fragments and instrumental solos - in ever new combinations on the canvas. "When there are sixty or seventy pictures, the question arises: what should one send to the exhibition? Which pieces would fit onto an album?"

"When Boris is immersed in his music, he is like a child in a heap of sand," reports Meier with loving admiration. "I've come up with a dozen tricks to get into the studio without scaring him to death." When the time comes, Meier sits down with his Hermes "Baby" and rattles away. "The typewriter is an erotic object," he says. "Typing is an empathy."

With their last album "Toy" Yello surfed on spherical sound waves. Now they have landed on the ground again. The joyfully swinging "Waba Duba" sets the playful tone and reminds us of the early days in its Dadaist trenchantness just as much as the ghostly story of the disappeared "Peter Strong". "Arthur Spark" manages the typical Yello-like trick of combining nonsense words with dance beats and wanderlust melancholy. "Big Boy's Blues" is mutant blues with Meier in Leonard Cohen mood. "Hot Pan" conjures up the world of the old spaghetti westerns and subverts it at the same time, "Rush for Joe" serves a grandiose trombone solo, and for dessert the Chinese singer Fifi Rong serves a wonderful song about the boundless love with which the suffering of mankind can be conquered. The ideas hiss in all directions - and everything fits seamlessly into the unmistakable Yello groove.

TRACKLIST

01. Waba Duba
02. The Vanishing Of Peter Strong
03. Way Down
04. Out Of Sight
05. Arthur Spark
06. Big Boy's Blues
07. Basic Avenue
08. Core Shift
09. Spinning My Mind
10. Hot Pan
11. Rush For Joe
12. Siren Singing (feat. FiFi Rong)