For nearly 30 years, Elefant Records out of Madrid has been refuge for musicians out of step with the present. Whether it’s Brill Building throwbacks like The School or disco holdovers like Fitness Forever, Elefant artists more often than not feel as if they’ve been plucked from a different era.
Take Me All Over the World, the latest from The Yearning, finds multi-talented songwriter and instrumentalist Joe Moore looking back into the past, finding inspiration in the age of Getz and Gilberto. The six tracks on Take Me All Over the World are well-steeped in all the hallmarks of the bossa nova era while occasionally veering off for a dalliance with French chanson.
It is not simply the instrumentation which draws such an easy comparison to the classic bossa nova recordings of the early 1960s. It was an era when easy lyricism and reasonable melodies were considered assets (decades before we decided that singers who looked like they were in extreme pain were superior musicians). Maddie Dobie’s vocals perfectly recall the star turns of Astrud Gilberto whose landmark recordings, you may recall, sound more like a wistful sigh than a pop star with something to prove.
Music-making is a universal human impulse, singing as natural as speech. There is no sin in intricacy or complexity. Neither is there any shame in effortlessness. All too often, we forget that. The Yearning have not, eschewing the laborious shouting often mistaken for singing in favor of approachable melodies that actually allow the lyrics to do the talking. For those of us hoping against hope for a return to an age before “more notes more loudly” became the dominant philosophy of Pop Vocalism, The Yearning may be exactly what we’ve been—well—yearning for.
Take Me All Over The World is available CD, Digital, and 10″ vinyl from Elefant Records.
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