Yak @ Village Underground, live music review: the whole world in their hands

‘Freak out jams’: Yak in full flow on stage at Village Underground. Photographs: Casey Cooper-Fiske

UFO bleeps from the PA system are silenced as the now classic bassline to opener ‘Harbour the Feeling’ is hammered out. Frontman Oli Burslem sees this as a cue to give a menacing tinkle on the ivories, before reaching for his Strat. The audience at Village Underground is hit by a rainbow of sound as Yak unleashes their unique blend of punk, psychedelia and pure experimentation on their prey for the evening.

It takes until just a few seconds after Burslem has begun singing for the barriers to fall forwards, thrusted by an audience ready to be eaten alive by the sheer sonic combination of raw guitar, precision bass and pulsating drums.

Crowd and band are brought even closer when Burslem makes his first lunge into the audience of the evening during second song ‘Heavens Above’. Burslem then proceeds to lead them all on an eerie impromptu rendition of bible classic ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’ at the end of stunning new track ‘White Carnivore’ – made even more unnerving when you think about who does have the whole world in his hands at the moment (Their political material is both relevant and needed).

Lunge: frontman Oli Burslem meets his people

Despite favourites from debut album Alas Salvation, such as ‘Victorious (National Anthem)’, whipping the crowd into a frenzy, it’s these new unreleased songs (another one is the excellent ‘Fried’) that are the highlights of the evening.

Burslem sews ‘Fried’ together with more familiar material: following on from the former’s closing lyric of “so I faked it” he tells the audience “and then I used somebody”. After a brief history lesson (“they used to make curtains here”) the band reignites the fire and blasts out the very track, ‘Use Somebody’. (The Kings of Leon song is of no relation.)

More refined moments (if you can call them that) such as new single ‘All I Need Is Some Sunshine In My Life’ and ‘Smile’ (among the best in the band’s repertoire), still maintain the gig’s perilous vibe, with the crowd hooked on Burslem’s croon and the seemingly effortless changes of tempo from the rhythm section.

New song ‘Words Fail Me’ is somewhat different from the band’s previous slower numbers – however Burslem’s voice simmers to the top of its subtle instrumentation, showing that his pipes are equally suited to depicting vulnerability and uncertainty as they are to kicking out the jams.

The band’s setlist on the night is somewhat muddled to the one they had down on paper, there was no time to play traditional closer ‘No’, with Burslem even commenting “that’s not supposed to be there, but then again, he’s not supposed to be there, and you’re not supposed to be there,” whilst pointing at his bandmates.

While some may have preferred it if the group had got through the full set list at a quicker pace, for me it’s the freak out jams and ad lib ‘covers’ in-between songs that make Yak such an enticing live proposition.

Yak do some last-minute tweaking of their amp settings

This is a band I have seen live numerous times and every single time seems different. And anyway, they can speed it up when they want to: after having their set cut down by jobsworths at Liverpool’s Sound City Festival to just 15 minutes, they still managed an impressive 7 or 8 songs.

The band’s freeform jams never slow down the pace of the gig and are always attention grabbing – when a band grabs snippets of songs like Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Cumberland Gap’, King Crimson’s ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ and the aforementioned ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’, you can never know what’s coming next.

The band’s set ends (as it often does) in a violent manor, with Burslem whirling his guitar around his head before violently thrashing it into his amp, ripping the cover straight off. Yak’s unpredictability (with Burslem stealing a photographer’s camera at one point and taking pictures) and the cathartic release their on stage destruction provides, makes them unrivalled in their craft. I’ve said it before but still, nobody does it better.