There’s, I think, a certain freedom in making music without quite knowing what shape it will take or what you’re making it for. Yoo Doo Right’s fourth full-length, Build and Rest by the Shepherd’s Light, co-produced by Montréal sound engineer, poet, and musician Ky Brooks, is an album of peculiar delights. The project carries a hint of apocalyptic garnish, even when Yoo Doo Right are at their most beautiful, and it makes you envision a drone hovering over a war scene, or a vampire prowling a town at night. The Montréal trio describe the album on Mothland as a reflection on the hardships of artistic resolve, and a tribute to the communities and shared joy that make that labor worthwhile. But listening to it, again, the images that came to mind were less wholesome scenes. Something about the album’s peculiar layering, its punk and grunge abrasions rubbing against its avant-garde eccentricities, makes for visceral strangeness and conjures pictures of people dancing at the end of the world; villains driving into the sunset with the stereo turned to the max, à la the Joker and Harley Quinn—especially evoked by the first track and its title, “Two Hoarders”—carnage left behind.
Not to say the record is joyless. Yoo Doo Right is wickedly effective at creating jarring collisions between opposing moods, making the music feel unpredictable and occasionally downright playful. “Tortue,” for instance, begins in a haze of twinkling, airy synths before marching drums arrive, followed by a guitar that introduces a loose jazziness. The instruments seem to relish their own differences and exude a charm from the mischief of their competing interests. It becomes political, groovy, and dreamy at once. Later, the rhythm shifts again; the synths take on a vaguely sci-fi quality, and the groove gives way to a blues-oriented rock—Led Zeppelin style—continually changing its landscape.
Halfway through the album, it’s obvious the band has a fondness for repetition, with restless musical phrases and lumbering beats circling back and building on themselves, but still, you’d be mistaken to fix them into a pattern. On “Two Hoarders,” an extended drone hangs in the air with the suspense of a film approaching its most dramatic scene. A sound resembling an aircraft passes overhead and disappears almost as quickly, subtly deepening the sense of impending trouble. A slow, ominous thumping begins in the background; other elements pulsate, seemingly rushing somewhere. Then it comes: the song opens into raging guitar and drums.
If Yoo Doo Right’s gift for atmosphere was tentative, here it becomes undeniable and absolutely thrilling. The electric guitar sounds wonderfully melodic against hard percussion and plays a kind of progression that makes you instinctively concieve lyrics that aren’t there. I find myself supplying a voice to it, desperate and sinister; maybe a story of desire turning obsessive or a dangerous devotion. It has the theatrical darkness of the Swedish rock band Ghost; that deliciously macabre quality. Like, if Wednesday Addams had a playlist titled, “Songs I’d listen to when the world burns to a crisp FINALLY,” this would be on it. The title only makes that fantasy more vivid: “Two Hoarders” becomes, in my head, two people so enclosed in their own world that they can watch everything else go up in flames and still laugh as they disappear down the road.
And to prove that this curious marriage of beauty and destruction isn’t a one-time wonder, “To Be a Lambskin (Or to Be the Whole Flock)” begins slightly romantically, with chords that could belong to a Spanish guitar playing in a small club, before the pace quickens and the cymbals and drums turn it into something much more ferocious. It is perversely celebratory for music that sounds this destructive—a kind of happy death metal, if such a thing exists. “Sofort, Si Fort” takes another route to the same surreal territory. Brooding piano chords and a melancholic hum eventually settle into a slow, almost heel-clicking groove, with a folksy softness tempering its otherwise gothic atmosphere. Even “Industriestraße 9,” which initially suggests something classical, like waltz music, cannot resist breaking out of its shell; gravelly synths loop in, periodically dragging the energy down before allowing it to rise again. But Yoo Doo Right are evidently sworn to elements of surprise rather than predictability.
Most likely, the album’s words come into distinct focus on “Neighbors Report Their Neighbors,” where spoken word gives its most overtly cinematic moment a voice. Kicking off the track, water trickling blurs into a wash of sound; wind, thunder, and even something like the sound of an aircraft. When Ky Brooks’ voice enters, their smoky, slightly androgynous delivery, softened by reverb, makes the poem feel more haunting as they intone the words: “And then the sky turns red / And then the sky turns ombre / And then, and then the sky turns white / And then, and then the sky turns… ( a soft gasp) / Neighbors report their neighbors / Neighbors, the door is open / Neighbors, there’s someone just outside the front.” Images of a reddening sky, silent birds and trees, neighbors watching neighbors, and a shirtless man talking on his cellphone all heighten the dread of this dystopian film.
The band’s commitment to extended motifs, from the hovering drone gathering force on “Two Hoarders” to the rolling drums on the closing title track, and slow-building intensity means that several pieces become uncomfortable as the mood or sound lasts for a long minute, so long that it may even start to feel hypnotic. On the closing title track, “Build and Rest by the Shepherd’s Light,” glassy, bell-like sounds become funereal over forty seconds. A gently strumming guitar runs beneath drums rolling in and out, while the funeral mood remains remarkably consistent across its nearly six minutes, denying the listener the relief of moving on.
This closing moment aptly illustrates the labor of creating: build, rest, build again; grieve, repeat, continue. The album’s post-rock, krautrock, ambient, and experimental impulses don’t feel like separate boxes when the instincts of one bleed into the other; a drone becomes a rhythm, a groove opens into rock, as if to say creating something doesn’t mean knowing exactly what it will become. The devil is as much in the journey as in the details. And with a musical world this fluid, there’s plenty of latitude to find a meaning of your own, whether you listen to the records and find in them the soundtrack to an ending, a revolution, a doomed romance, a supernatural gathering, a city in ruins, two lovers ecstatic, hoarding a secret from the rest of the world. So much to feel, and Yoo Doo sets down the pieces and lets your imagination do the rest.
