Officer! — Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes
Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes was the 4th album from Officer!- the decidedly wonky ‘n’ sonic unwell project helmed by Brit Mick Hobbs( Half Japanese). The album originally appeared back in 1988, and it found Mr. Hobbs & his odd sonic cohorts covering a fairly bit of sonic ground. Moving from Syd Barret like pop rock child-like fare, onto general more deranged singer-songwriter fare, drop into off-key synth-pop, simmering art-rock, klezmer tinged jazz moments, strutting reggae, odd world music touches, and a few other fairly surprising genre diversions along the way. Here from the folks at Klanggallerie is a much-needed CD reissue of the late 80’s oddity- adding in six unreleased tracks from the same period, bring up the total release playtime to sixty one minutes.
Like most of Klanggallerie releases, the CD is presented in a four-panel glossy digipak. This features garish yellow & purple color scheme on most of the panels, and a black & white picture of Hobs & his band under the CD- so simple, yet effective bit of packaging.
The line-up for this album is Mick Hobbs- bass, double bass, drums, drum machine, guitars, percussion, recorder, synth, samples & vocals. Bill Gilonis- bass, clarinet, keyboards, thumb piano. Daniel Koskowtiz- drums. Claudia Schmid- Cello & Vocals. Keisuke Gindt & Antoine Gindt- on electric guitars, and Felix Fiedorowicz- Recorder. The original album featured ten tracks, but here it’s expanded to a sixteen-track affair- with extra tracks from the same year.
As an album, Yes Yes No.. wonders from quirky sing-song child-like tunes with angular edges & subtly sarcastic lyric. Onto unwell recorder & synth work-outs with Hobbs wordy & cutting vocals been joined waving female vocals. Through jaunting-yet-off-kilter twee-pop strum along with throbbing synth undertones & playful world music elements. Onto off-color & sinister slurred white man funk, over to awkward indie rock wonders. The bonus tracks bring in more world music elements into the brew- we have the detailed clip-clopping & darting ethnic percussion meets rich ‘n’ churning guitar strums of “Poximal Interphalangeal”, or piping & weaving synth meets African guitar tones and buzzing down feedback of "Whee!".
This is the second reissue of Officer! back-catalog on Klanggallerie following on from 2018’s Earlier Music- which as it title suggested featured material from the early 80’s- so hopefully they’ll be more reissues along the way. In finish, if you enjoy wonky & off-color Avant pop music, that darts all over the genre map- you’ll be needing to put this CD in your collection!.