Judging by how good today’s offering goes down, they’re not going to have any issues keeping the momentum going.
Words: Jake Hawkes.
Photos: Patrick Gunning.
When we spoke to Yard Act at Reading in 2021, they said that they planned to be fourth from the top of the main stage in five years time. We don’t think they were serious, but judging by their main stage opening slot this year, they might not have been far off.
On a stage bedecked in trenchcoat-clad mannequins, singer James opens with a crowd-pleasing shout of… “this doesn’t mean as much to us as Leeds will!” Luckily, the insult is soon forgotten as ‘Land of the Blind’ kicks in.
Months of shows have made the band into a tightly wound machine. James struts the stage and talks, yelps, shouts and sings his way through the tracks, while the rest of the band power through each song. They even have a saxophone now, which is the kind of nonsense we at Dork are very much on board with.
It’s impressive how tracks like ‘Take the Money’ have evolved and been reworked for the live show, without compromising what made them so fun in the first place. In fact, all the cuts from the first album have been nudged ever so slightly towards the electronic-laden, more meandering sound of new cut ‘Trenchcoat Museum’, which forms the sprawling eight-minute focal point of the entire set. How do you keep the audience’s attention for such a long song? Turns out half of the mannequins are actually backing dancers, leading to one of the more surreal stageshows we’ve seen in a while.
From the gloriously weird to the genuinely heartfelt, ‘100% Endurance’ follows. The crowd sing and clap along, proving that musings on existentialism and our place in the universe can go down just as well as synth-led lyrics about sartorial history.
Closing with ‘The Overload’, the whole set is a reminder that Yard Act have done so well that a lot of people were asking what they could possibly do to maintain their trajectory. Judging by how good today’s offering goes down, they’re not going to have any issues keeping the momentum going.
