I’ll admit that it took a while for me to jump on the Yard Act bandwagon, and even after listening to their debut The Overload back in 2022, I wasn’t fully convinced. Not because the album wasn’t good, but because there was a constant deluge of post-punk adjacent bands from the United Kingdom that were systematically taking over the airwaves and North American music media craze. So for me, Yard Act was thrown into the mix of bands like Dry Cleaning, Fontaines D.C., Shame, Black Midi, Black Country New Road, Squid, etc.
Omni
Perhaps someone else across the pond on the American side of that ilk is a band like Omni, who opened the Yard Act Montreal show at Theatre Fairmount with a ridiculously tight set. Omni hits hard and fast, but at times does feel like a paint-by-numbers post-punk band, if that makes sense. If you googled modern American post-punk, they would come up. The songs live seemed to slightly blend together at a point, but the Omni boys kept the intensity for the main event of the night, a little band called Yard Act.
Even as a music journo whose job it is to keep up to date on the newest bands, it’s sometimes hard to keep up when it’s constantly pouring new bands. So Yard Act’s The Overload was a quick listen for me; I immediately felt the influence of bands like The Fall, mixed with the darker/more experimental, older side of Arctic Monkeys, but it was a one-and-done thing for me. The lyrics; the sarcastic wit and the self-deprecation chips of leader vocalist James Smith were somewhat lost on me because of well, my own overload… I told myself I would revisit the album, and I did… but I never gave it a proper listen. I let the other journos review it for me and that was that. Jump two years later and Yard Act’s follow-up, Where’s My Utopia? drops and I checked out a few songs. They seemed to be diving into a weird Italo disco dance mixed with a post-punk world and it seemed fun, but how would it compare live? Would it be another all-white four-piece, post-punk boys club group? I’m happy to report that no, no they are not.
Yard Act
Yard Act is best served as a live band, that is both hilarious and cleverly devious. They took the stage as a seven-piece, the core four-piece of Smith on vocals, bassist Ryan Needham, the mustachioed guitarist Sam Shipstone, drummer, Jay Russell, and backup dancers/vocalists Lauren Fitzpatrick and Daisy J.T Smith (who took as much spotlight as Smith with their delirious dance moves and shining pipes, as well as a percussionist/synth player/ and saxophonist.
Right at the start of “Dead Horse,” the gig took shape as not just a post-punk show, but a bopping dance-fuelled extravaganza. At times it felt like watching an in-tune, synchronized Motown soul band, that gave everyone in the band their own little moments; the frenetic buzzing solos from Shipstone, the smooth too-cool bass riffs from Needham, and of course the poetic-drunken wit of Smith—who sometimes sounds like he’s reading verse from someone like Yeats, but no, it’s his own insane mind that chooses to mutter through 100 words a minute that the English language is going out of style. I felt myself shaking my head at the full endurance of this band that never stopped until they did, but came back with the self-referential single encore “The Trench Coat Museum.” The new album doesn’t even give this band proper justice. This is a band that demands to be seen live.
