Three albums in, Yard Act have finally stopped assembling songs in the gaps between tour vans and started building them in a room together, live, all four of them breathing the same air. You can hear the difference — it’s looser, more muscular, and less of a collage. What you can’t quite hear, not consistently anyways, is the old danger.
You’re Gonna Need A Little Music opens with James Smith laying down the terms like a bouncer at a club nobody’s sure they want: sit down, shut up, listen, or switch it off. It’s a strong bluff. The record mostly cashes it. “Cherophobe Rock” struts like it owns the postcode. “Thrill Of The Chase” has the kind of coiled-spring groove that made “Payday” a party trick people still do impressions of. And “Janey Said” is Smith at his sharpest — sardonic, self-aware, allergic to his own soapbox even while standing on it.
But there’s a softness creeping in around the edges that wasn’t there before. Where The Overload felt like it was smirking with a knife behind its back, and Where’s My Utopia? turned that smirk into a strobe-lit dancefloor, this one settles for charm more often than it reaches for teeth. Tracks like “New Beginnings” and “Redeemer” drift into a pleasant midtempo haze — good company, but forgettable the next morning. The record’s central irony, that a band this obsessed with talking can’t stop lecturing us about listening, lands a little too on the nose by the time “Talky Talky People” rolls around.
None of this makes it a bad record. It’s a good one, occasionally a great one in four-minute bursts. It’s just a record that knows its own formula a little too well and trusts it a little too much.
