Yuck’s self-titled album is their second LP and it’s garage rock that borrows from shoegaze at times and also has a grungy aspect to it as well. The guitars have tons of reverb, sometimes to a fault, and the vocals have a grungy quality that I found quite annoying. On the album opener, “Get Away,” the guitars are a swirling mess of reverb, which is good because the vocals on that track and others sound a bit like Billy Corgan, who I can’t stand. The female vocalist is far more pleasant, but nothing to write home about. Some tracks, like “The Wall” and “Holing Out,” despite the shoegazing guitars, remind me of some of the most uninspired 1990s alt rock.
Yuck make me think of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey in some ways. This is a rather inconsistent album that shows promise in places but has some songs that are absolute clunkers. Unlike Pablo Honey, the annoying songs kind of outweight the promise the band shows.
The bad songs are too rooted in grunge, but there are times when they turn down the volume, tone down the distortion, and show some diverse songwriting. I much preferred these slower, quieter songs. The acoustic guitars on “Shook Down” provided a much needed break from the guitar onslaught of the first two tracks, though the song itself is not really anything special. “Suicide Policeman” used xylophone and some muted brass instrumentation just to spice things up. The guitars on “Suck” wail in a pleasant way and the almost-whispered vocals on “Stutter” are much better than the aggressive ones. Even still, these songs get old too.
“Rubber” ends the album with seven minutes piece of droning guitars and vocals buried way down in the mix. It carries on for the final three minutes, with just the guitars blaring, and it’s not the worst moment on the album, but it feels a little arbitrary to me. The highest point on this album, for me, was “Georgia” which is a perfectly pleasant noise-pop tune.
The low points of this album are too bothersome to overlook. I’d recommend this to fans of bands like Smashing Pumpkins, but this feels a lot more anonymous than the better grunge or alt. rock acts of the recent past. There’s promise here, but the guitars and the vocals just wore on me too much for me to want to spend any more time with this album.
Walking is Still Honest 