Shake hands with Yossarian

Here’s one that made it through the piles of average music I get sent. Kind of. OK, I admit I didn’t really give Yossarian a listen till I saw some other esteemed British music bloggers posting on them. So onto the bandwagon again for me again then. But I think this lot are good.

They’re straight out of the (apparently) burgeoning ‘Cardiff scene’, and they do a decent line in moody 80s-influenced indie guitar, with lyrics celebrating the mundanity of normal life. Their myspace lists their influences as

“The Smiths Pavement Modest Mouse Mogwai Belle and Sebastian Weezer Explosions in the Sky Radiohead Interpol The Arcade Fire My Morning Jacket Idlewild ...Trail of the Dead”

If you take out Weezer, Belle and Sebastian and mebbe Idlewild, you’ll get a rough picture of their sound. They’re obviously not as good as any of these, but hey, the kids are showing some fine promise.

Probably their best track, Invincible comes on like a more juvenile Mogwai, who sing about getting pissed and running out of food instead of, er, not singing at all. Some have compared them to The Rakes, but they don’t have the same spikiness, which is probably a good thing.

It looks like they've been targeting UK music bloggers, and they seem like nice blokes. They’ll even send you a 4-track demo EP if you ask. While you’re there, you can ask them what "Come on Koala" means.

And the hot news is that, as of today, they’re changing their name to Shake My Hand. Why? Like that’s a better name than Yossarian? (the main protagonist in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, fact fans) I can only hope that the name change is a drunken indiscretion in a similar vein to the stories in their lyrics. While they’re hopefully changing it back, have a listen to a couple of tunes.

Download: Yossarian – Invincible
Download: Yossarian – Koala

You can download the other songs from the EP on their myspace.

More songs on their main website (although a couple of these are bizarrely in WMA format).