Das Australische Musikmagazin Mess & Noise hat wie folgt gewählt:
http://www.messandnoise.com/news/2029698
1
The Devastations
Yes, U (Beggars Banquet)
Yes, U makes me want to fuck and shiver in equal measure. Every note on the album is imbued with an intoxicating mixture of darkness and sexuality. In some parts it can be terrifying. “Let’s turn off the lights/Let’s pretend we’re dead,” Conrad Standish sings to his lover on ‘Oh Me, Oh My’, a song that evokes the desperate extremes of desire as much as the sweaty bed sheets its characters are bound in. On ‘The Pest’, guitarist and second songwriter Tom Carlyon adopts the persona of a stalker penning a love-letter to his victim. “You’d make a beautiful wife,” he recites coldly. “Have I made myself clear?”
Inspired by the outer-space electronic sounds of artists like Suicide, Yoko Ono and Barry Adamson, and infused with the glammed-up funk of David Bowie, Yes, U was a radical departure from The Devastations first two albums. When the band – Standish, Carlyon and drummer Hugo Cran – left Melbourne for Europe circa 2004, they were stuck in the shadow of predecessors like Nick Cave and contemporaries The Drones. Their third album, recorded in Berlin, mixed in New York and featuring guests Andrea Lee on piano and HTRK’s Nigel Yang on drum machine, was as much about escaping from the history of Australian artists that had relocated to Europe as discovering their own sonic identity.
Unlike The Drones’ Gala Mill, the record that topped last year’s Mess+Noise Critics’ Poll and on which songwriter Gareth Liddiard expanded his lyrical talent to cover multiple CD booklet pages, Yes, U was an exercise in saying little but conveying much: on ‘Mistakes’ Standish repeated the same three words “I make mistakes” over and over again. That one simple line, sung in a tone suggesting it could be either a sigh of resignation or a boyish gloat, coupled with the incredible sonic texture of the record, spoke as much about the human condition as Liddiard’s carefully-constructed tales of woe. Yes, U is a minimal album on first listen that reveals itself as an odyssey with each spin.
– Andrew Ramadge
--