YELLE at SXSW Music Festival. Thurs, March 15, 2012. Rating: NNN
Blog house was never a genre of music you want to be associated with. In fact, it was never a genre at all. It’s just a way to put down mainstream dance music that sprung up online in the MySpace era.
Yelle, a French three piece named after its energetic lead singer, came up at the height of that wave of bastardized house music (is it even house?). In 2005, the group posted the song Short Dick Cuizi, an in-joke in (dis)honour of French rapper Cuizinier of TTC, to MySpace. It was renamed Je Veux Te Voir, and it became a charting single in France and a crossover hit on, of course, American music blogs.
Its song structure was haphazard, video ironic and lyrics nonsensical.
So far, all the hallmarks of the pejorative blog house.
But catching Yelle a few years later, after the release of their second album, Safari Disco Club, everything becomes clear. This is not some also-ran in a throwaway music trend of the 00s. This is just a French group doing peppy Eurodance that somehow managed to fit in here.
Spend a set with Yelle and see it’s more like foreign aerobics class material than anything that could pass for blog house content.
Yelle (I mean the lead singer Julie Budet) didn’t stand still for a second while her two producer/DJs stayed in the background fiddling with synths and drum beats. Only half the crowd at 1100 Warehouse bought into her clap-along, arms-in-the-air style. The other half treated the all-French cheerleading/raps as an exotic novelty.
Right now, Yelle is finding more chart success stateside than in Europe. So if you want to categorize it, maybe Europop for Americans is the more appropriate genre.
