Some bands, on their first release, sound a bit like a newborn calf. Stumbling, confused, and, let’s be honest, kind of gross-looking. Yellow Minute, on the other hand, in taking time to make sure things everything is in place, have created a pop gem.
While their sound doesn’t match up 100%, this band reminds me of Jens Lekman in its use of strings and programming to give the EP a feeling of being its own world. While it plays, I find myself completely caught up in Brennan’s storytelling.
The lyrics here revolve around traveling. The excitement of going and the sadness of leaving. The songs’ protagonists go to New York, Greece, and, well, drunk on the side of the road. And Brennan sells these travelogues with a solid indie-rock vocal style.
“Yellow minute,” according to the band’s Facebook page, comes from a Croatian term referring to the feeling of spontaneous creativity. While these compositions obviously took time to put together, they do have an air of immediacy about them, as though each song came out of a moment, needing to be nurtured to find its final form.
In an act of generosity (I’m guessing), Yellow Minute is offering this EP for free download on their BandCamp page.
In you+you+you+you=me Sean Brennan (with help from violinist Chelsey Martin and others along the way) has written a group of songs that perfectly captures the peculiar wistfulness that comes with needing to break away from the known and find out what more exists in the world.
I’ve been waiting for a release from Yellow Minute for a while now. I first heard the band’s music on MySpace a couple of years ago while perusing local bands. Not long afterward, I saw lead songwriter Sean Brennan play a solo set at the Bike Saviors. you+you+you+you=me, the band’s debut EP, is the sound of the pop aesthetic I heard back then expanded tenfold by a host of collaborators.
