YAANG Wants To Dance With You.
YAANG By kim Sabatelli
YAANG wants to dance with you. The Manchester band combines techno elements with hard rock in a dancepunk-esque fury. Davey Moore (vocals/sampler), Ben White (bass), and Oliver (Ollie) Duffy (vocals/guitar) are experimenting with genre bending, asking themselves what they can bring to the music scene that hasn’t been done before.
YAANG’s set up as a band is quite unconventional, with Davey using a sampler and singing, and the other two representing the live band aspect of the music. Ben plays bass and Ollie plays the guitar and sings. It took a while for the band to take their true form and find a way to make their niche one of their strengths. For four years, Davey and Ollie played together without a bass. It was Ben who suggested he join the band, asking his friends one day, “can I just come to a YAANG thing to play bass and see if it works?” It ended up working, and the rest is history. The change came about at the right time, as it turned out that Davey and Ollie were growing so uninspired by their two-piece that they hadn’t practiced in over a year. Davey admitted that they were “clearly not challenging ourselves. It wasn’t engaging us creatively, and then this little goofball popped up and we were just like, fuck it. We completely changed the sound.” The band are both very focused on their own sound and focused on the energy of the crowd. “ I dance about like a twat for the whole set. So if other people don’t dance then I’m doing something wrong,” Davey said.
The band are inspired by a number of genres that take some attentive listening to detect in their sound. “early to late 70’s powerpop-y stuff that’s got a lot of intricate chords and big dynamic changes. We do that sort of thing but it’s not in a full-band format so you wouldn’t necessarily pick it out,” Ben revealed. The band is also heavily influenced by Krautrock because of all the influences that the genre itself is able to draw from. “There’s a bit of disco thrown in there,” Davey revealed of their new, unreleased music. “We just try and get away with as much as we can as long as it still sounds like us. The second we go oh it’s not really YAANG-y then it goes away,” Ben explained.
YAANG By Kim Sabatelli
Something that inspires their music more indirectly is their upbringing. Ben revealed “we all grew up in very boring, plain towns that meant that we were sort of striving for something a little bit more exciting. So, we’re in an exciting city and we’re doing an exciting thing, making exciting music. The Manchester scene’s great, and we’re proud to be part of it.” Living in Manchester has pushed YAANG to be where they are now. Davey explained that “the best thing about the Manchester scene is there are so many bands and it has such a rich history of music, so if you’re shit, people come to your first two gigs and then no one will come, which is brutal, but I think that forces every band in Manchester to be good. And If you actually want to do it, you learn. You reflect on those shit gigs and you change, you evolve. We don’t just allow shit stuff to thrive.”
Being in between a live rock band and an electronic techno group initially made it more challenging for the band to find their scene. Ben recalled, “a period around the start of the three-piece era where you can tell the promoters didn’t quite know who to book us with. We were getting put on electronic lineups and then the rock-y element was quite abrasive. We were being put on more rock-y lineups, but the electronic element was still in it. I think the scene has evolved and we have evolved to the point where we slot in a lot easier, but we stand out enough to make a statement.” Davey added “I think we’re in neither [the rock nor the electronic scene]. We aren’t making electronic dance music, and we aren’t necessarily making straight rock. I don’t think we need to be in any of those scenes. There is a wave right now of bands that I think have all decided, we don’t need to be in one genre. I think it’s more fun to play around with the dynamics and have softer songs, more electronic songs, and more rock-y songs. Trying to pigeon hole yourself is boring and we don’t get paid enough. We're doing this because we love it, so we write what we love and we play it well. We don’t really care who we’re playing with, as long as it’s lively and it’s energetic.”
YAANG are even experimenting with their distribution, releasing a new single, Z.F.A.L, that is in no way conventional. The release will be a twenty minute vinyl-only release of which only one-hundred copies will be made. “This whole release we played at Manchester Psych Fest and they offered us to do a second secret set at two in the morning. We didn't want to just do the same set twice, so we thought we’d come up with a whole other set, a Krautrock jam basically, for half an hour as a one-off,” Ben explained. When there was an issue with the recording, YAANG decided they would re-record it and make it a semi-improvised jam. Davey added that the recording is “a snapshot of a moment, basically. A piece of our history.” Of their next release on streaming services, the band remained mysterious, but Davey did confirm that they “have a fully recorded EP that is fucking mint. We are holding off for opportunities currently, is my vague answer. But we have material, we are ready.”
YAANG By Kim Sabatelli
