All I See Is Circles

Yard Act “Fixer Upper”

On a groove level “Fixer Upper” has the twitchy and anxious brutality of The Fall, but in the place of Mark E. Smith’s abstracted invective you get an overly cheerful guy rambling on about his new house in the suburbs and demonstrating himself to be exactly the kind of well-to-do fool who would, say, vote yes on Brexit. It’s a joke, obviously, but it’s played very dry and James Smith’s commitment to the bit of embodying a clueless dork with money to burn makes him come across more like Steve Coogan than anyone in the post-punk lineage.

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Shame “Nigel Hitter”

“Nigel Hitter” is a song that’s caught between the exhaustion and wear-and-tear of doing something all the time and the dullness of doing nothing all the time, a jarring lifestyle transition that was once mainly available to touring musicians but suddenly is relatable to a much larger portion of people on the planet. The fun of this song is that the music doesn’t try to convey either sort of tedium described in the lyrics, but rather a burst of energy and inspiration on the other side of the grind. The rhythms are energized, the chorus hits like a bolt of unexpected joy.

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