Urusei Yatsura – We Are Urusei Yatsura 2023 Xxtra Version

Rocket Girl

Revisiting the trauma that was the ’90s is always a precarious business, musically. For all the forgotten gems, there’s a danger of dredging up all the dreadful Oasis that was everywhere. And obviously a danger that that record you loved when you were fifteen really wasn’t that much cop.

Not so with Urusei Yatsura. Let’s emphasise that from the off. They were one of those indie-pop bands that really did it for me in my teens and really do it for me in my 40s. While I’ve sloughed off probably a majority of my teenage listening, I’ve always kept Yatsura on rotation.

They were a smidge at odds with a lot of what I remember. They weren’t quite part of that adult indie(ish) stuff that proliferated in Glasgow at the time — Delgadoes, Arab Strap, Mogwai. Probably by dint of being very fanzine, not too srs. They got compared to Pavement or Sonic Youth a lot and never really sounded like either. Probably closer to Swell Maps.

The Sonic Youth comparison was probably more about intention and method than actual sound. Yatsura did a lot of Youth-shaped things — feedback, drumsticks between the strings — but they were always accents to the fairly straight-up pop songs. They had something of the melting slacker vibes of Pavement, but nothing of the archly self-conscious lyrics. There was a class thing with Yatsura, I realise now — they had cheap gear because that’s the gear they could find and afford. They ranted their guitars rather than piling on the pedals, shoegazely.

It’s difficult to make this a statistical thing, but it felt like everyone who was into Yatsura wrote a fanzine. There was a sense they were closer to the actual DIY — more like a K Records band than anything I was seeing in the ’90s UK. There was a community around them, and they’d reply to messages. The press, by and large, were dickheads about them because they didn’t present enough rock star-ish mystique.

One of the problems was always that they never got their fair shout in the press. And they were writing these lovely tunes — melodies like honeycombs and arrangements like agonies. If there was a band that had a DIY aesthetic, it was Yatsura — pictures of tapes, polaroids, hand-drawn or typed song titles on their very un-design school sleeves. Songs were often cutesy but never saccharine (unlike, say, Bis with whom they’re associated).

So here’s a re-mastering of their debut album. For my money their best sounding record — it had the soft edges of a dubbed tape, but the groaning discords still leap out. And this remaster has done it a great service — it’s still the same record, but the rhythm section jumps out.

Suddenly the fact their bassist Elaine Graham was a guitarist before joining makes sense — she’s got a great sense of holding down the melodic core of the song, especially where Fergus Lawrie and Graham Kemp (guitars) go ham on some of the outros. The remaster brings all of that out in a way that the two decades+ of listening to my original LP never did.

Also we get a second LP (labelled Xtra Trax / Xxtra Trax, of course) of b-sides and errata. I’m something of a Yatsura completist, for my sins, so most of the second LP here isn’t new material to my ears, but it’s nice to have it one place — not least for the blisteringly janky, Bataille-citing “Lo-Fi Scary Ballons”. And for that matter, the better versions of the songs that formed their first EP / mini-album.

While the main LP is a set of roughly similar tunes (I’ll come to that in a sec), the second LP is showing some of the ideas that didn’t make it onto records — the morbidly long noise-out jams (“The Power Of Negative Thinking / The Love That Brings You Down”), the full-on sprightly pogo-tastic “Silver Krest”.

For what it’s worth, I’d say that the main LP is a highpoint in ’90s UK indie. There’s nothing here that’s embarrassing in 2023 — no boring sexism, no lazy metaphors. While there’s a few noise-outs, it’s only the closer (“Road Song”) which stays past a few minutes — dissolving into a mess of detuned guitars and sounds from kids’ toys.

And even so, there’s nothing of the ‘rant all the effects to eleven’ — this isn’t a shoegaze noise out and importantly it does sound like actually attacking the guitars, rather than the cowards’ way out of white noise pedal business. And it’s all neatly held in place by a brother / sister rhythm section that really is exemplary of indie rhythm sections.

Where We Are Urusei Yatsura sits in Yatsura’s canon is that it’s a surprisingly consistent record — given that they were a relatively young band and clearly had a bunch of ideas in the mix, given the b-sides. Their second LP, All Hail Urusei Yatsura, was a lot brighter, a lot more of an effort to get the ideas across in a radio-friendly way. Great, but lacking the effortlessly louche sound of the first record.

Their third LP, Everybody Loves Urusei Yatsura, was a really unfortunate swansong — fucked over by labels and delayed, it was a great collection of increasingly opaque maudlin pop that struggled to get any traction. We Are Urusei Yatsura was the moment where everything seemed to go right — all the excitement and bounce of indie pop (“Siamese”, “Kewpies Like Watermelon”), all the vitriol appropriate to an era of shit politics (“Death 2 Everyone”), paeans to bedsit hangovers (“Plastic Ashtray”).

Lo-fi is a weird term in 2023 — it seems to have shifted definitions several times. Urusei Yatsura’s lo-fi is more like making the best out of shit gear — not quite winsome, wilfully obscure bad recording, but definitely a record that’s informed by those soft edges of tapes that have been dubbed once too many times (see also: Ashtray Navigations). Two singers and two songwriters, going song for song — meaning that it’s varied enough. There’s also a masterpiece of of a manifesto in opener “Siamese”, both singers ranting on about fanzine culture (“Form a gang / A lo-fi band”).

It’s dangerous to say this, so know that this is at least partly informed by nostalgia on my part, the great poisoner that that is; but this is still the best indie pop record of the decade for my money. I doubt this record’s going to be a retirement fund for them. but it’s hopefully time that they’re recognised as one of the bands that are worth saving from the steaming rhoidy shit that was the 1990s.

-Kev Nickells-