Octopuses long-awaited début album comes smartly packaged with a bright yellow sun shining down on green fields behind large bold letters spelling out the singularly positive title Yes Please. There's a certain faux-naivety that carries from the bold artwork through to the lively music within. Octopuses like to present a simple front, from their comedic DIY music videos to the chip-tune Casiotone keyboard sounds, but these features belie the underlying sophistication and emotional root to their music. Their party-tunes often contain darker themes bubbling just below the surface: 'Not The Bees' is full of the very real fear that the bees might be getting wiped out, 'Circle Of Friends', although it contains the yes please of the album title and sounds like it could be the menu music for a new Mario surfing game, is full of worry that the titular circle might be losing one of it's friends and I could go on in this vein. 'Cool Story Bro' starts the album off, this track was released as a single last year accompanied by an excellent story video where singer Adam Bell is a washed up old man reminiscing about the bands hey-dey in a 1985 Top Of The Pops appearance posted to him on VHS. It's a great introduction to the band, showing off the tight rhythm section of brothers Alan and Rob Grice on drums and bass respectively, Adam Bell's aforementioned keyboard tones paired up with Smalan Odgers distinctive fuzzy guitar and a touch of Tom Matthews xylophone plinking away in the background.
'Space Girl' opens with the lyric, 'space girl's gone away, space girl's gone away, far away from this world that's filled with so much pain,' it's the most openly melancholic song here and sounds like it's grown on top of Bach's 'Air On The G String'. The emotions are overblown here and there's a particularly glorious crescendo when the trumpets come in and play the melody accompanied by some exuberant pitch-wah guitar playing from Smalan Odgers. The ska romp of 'Pogo' is reminiscent of The Specials in more ways than one. That bass-line is pretty damn close to the main line from 'Guns Of Navarone' and the dual vocals, whether it's Tom Matthews off-kilter take on rap or Adam Bell's resigned melodic vocal, both seem to recall elements of Specials front-man Terry Hall, with his penchant for deadpan kitchen-sink melodrama.
The second half of this 10 track album begins with 'Girl' and again what on the surface might seem like an unrestrained love song turns out to be full of little hints of cynicism, as ultimately Bell reduces his love for this girl to only being, 'something to play with when I'm bored'. It's all delivered energetically at full pelt and ends with an abrupt slow down and prog-rock-esque power riff, the sort of motif that sounds like it's going to be a seg-way into an instrumental wig-out. Perhaps that's one for the live show though, as the album moves us swiftly on to 'Not My Dog', a bluesy number with a Smalan Odgers lead vocal, harmonica and a chorus of male falsetto vocals, that sounds like a comedy version of The Band, singing counter-point lines and 'woof woof's, where you'd normally expect la's. Their up-coming single 'Bouncy Castle' comes next, sounding very much like Indie Rock pioneers Pavement, particularly in Adam Bell's vocal delivery. It's great writing, simultaneously pop and unconventional, a nice little encapsulation of the Octopuses sound. The best moment comes after two and a half minutes, where things strip down, with a bouncy spring sample added in for good measure, things build back to an ear-worm crescendo repeating the 'Bouncy Castle' refrain until it certainly gets stuck in your head.
'Acid Rain' begins with Casio organs playing a motif that recalls The Beatles 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' before breaking down to a 70s rock sounding guitar riff and another lead vocal from Smalan Odgers. This track jumps between contrasting sections with regularity, with each section containing varying degrees of psychedelia. There's one section where Tom Matthews takes the mic, which wouldn't have sounded out of place in one their old Big Salad label-mates Milk & Biscuits songs. Perhaps that's down to the distinctive trumpet tone from Rachel Simpson, who is used effectively throughout the record but most recalls her Milk & Biscuits playing here. The album ends with 'I'm Just Livin' In My Dreams' which starts off sounding like the sort of mournful ballad I'm used to hearing at the end of many 00s American alt-country albums, but this being Octopuses of course it doesn't stay that way. Things step up a gear or two for the chorus, it's musically joyous with lyrics about wanting to be happy but finding it a bit tricky. Hats off to the band for using the verses to reference many of the album songs, it's clever stuff tying things together like this but it does point to some tracks which super fans might be missing on this album. There are some great songs the band could have included like my personal favourite of their singles, 'Sarcastic', where Tom Matthews actually sounds a bit like Ian Curtis, or the liberally bonkers 'Ghost In The House' which has to be heard to be believed. Still both of those tracks are a couple of years old now, so maybe the band felt they weren't so relevant to this release and Yes Please might be just the right length for modern attention spans.
Adam Kidd
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