Postpunk jazz pop between grooviness and fraying, the likes of which are rarely played right now.
This album immediately takes a top spot in the “Grand Openings” competition. The trio Yelka plays a wonderfully balanced hybrid of jazz and pop that is not being played anymore, it is a cover version of Steely Dan’s “King Of The World”, a six-minute exercise in elegance, grooviness and fraying. And after the song disappears into the fadeout, the instruments come back again, start turning the wheel, and you can’t say with certainty whether human hands were even involved here.
Yelka are Daniel Meteo (guitar), Christian Obermaier (drums) and Yelka Wehmeier (vocals, bass, songwriting), among the guests Daniel Nentwig (The Whitest Boy Alive) is particularly noteworthy with his one-and-only space probe keyboards in the first track. The album JEANS offers listening experiences that are far removed from each other, for example as a sound that moves forward with its own dynamic, or as a songwriter piece that oscillates between Tom Verlaine’s interpretation of postpunk and Robert Wyatt’s jazz explorations.
The “Magic Mountain” is an extensive travel experience, Yelka came from Chicago via Grevenbroich to Monschau, and they still live “in a room from here to there,” says the singer. The one and a half minute long “Moon For Now” is an instrumental snippet in which piano and guitar search for otherworldly harmonies, “Walking Whispering” celebrates the standstill. Oh yes, JEANS is the third album in Yelka’s American trilogy, but it can also be done without a background, the instruments (or those who operate them) tell each other a lot while playing, they dance around each other, move out, find their way back, the singer meditates in a state of subtle cool. Colleague Masha Qrella had one thought when she heard this music: “I would like to play in the band too.”