Album Review: Natural Yogurt Band – Away With Melancholy (2008)

Album Review: Natural Yogurt Band – Away With Melancholy (2008)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Potholes

Support! The Natural Yogurt Band – Away With Melancholy

Natural Yogurt Band is a curious group, which is not much of a surprise for a couple of library musicians. Yes, library music. It’s a term that has most music listeners scratching their heads, meanwhile heavy hip-hop heads and producers from all walks of life tend to perk their ears at the mere mention of new library music. So what is it? Think obscure, eye-catching album art. Think limited pressings. Think instrumental. But don’t think of libraries, at least not the type for books. Unlike elevator music, library music is made primarily for the dense libraries of stock music rolls that fuel television and radio, and in hip-hop culture they serve a primary purpose of providing new breaks (sometimes in the case of Jay-Z’s “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)”, they can be worth an entire beat). So when you think of library music, you should think of funky instrumentals that, for whatever reason, are not intended for a large audience and have no qualms with slipping far under the radar.

Peanut Butter Wolf (Stones Throw) and his buddy at Now-Again Egon tend to look at the situation a bit differently, however. While copies of Away With Melancholy are no doubt stashed deep within Egon’s glorious vinyl stacks, he’s also decided to team up with Natural Yogurt Band’s label, Jazzman, to re-release their library album stateside in a limited 1,000 pressing run. And Egon happens to be right in attempting to give this one a slightly larger audience. Heck, in this case it even makes sense to market this one towards America’s hip-hop demographic. About halfway through “Chit Chat” the funk starts to kick in along with vocal chants, and it’s at this early point of the record that I usually find myself hooked.

But what really grabs my interest are tracks like “Voodoo”, “Lament for Piano” and “Better Days to Come”. Not because they do anything original, but precisely the opposite – every piece of them sounds like things I’ve heard before in other places. While I expected this release to be either jazzy or funky, what I really didn’t expect it to do was take me on a journey through what sound like fundamental hip-hop breaks being interpreted through library and acid jazz styles. It’s especially the tempo change midway through “Better Days to Come” that both impresses me and fires off my “where have I heard that before?” alarms. “Lament for Piano” and the piano intro to “The Woods” inspire the same disappointment in myself for being unable to place sources.

Much of the album continues in this way. The drums from ex-Little Barrie member Wayne Fullwood sound crisp and tight, while multi-instrumentalist Miles Newbold brings everything from electric and bass guitar to vibes, brass and other assortments of instruments contributing to this album’s funky center; think the sound of Blaxploitation soundtracks. It’s a very enjoyable sound that certainly isn’t doing anything new for anyone, but Away With Melancholy doesn’t come close to embarrassing itself either. Whenever I put this album on over the past week, I’ve caught myself leaving it on repeat and letting it sink in like comfort food. And it’s not heartless, either: when “Voodoo” drops in the track’s purpose seems more like a conscious break in the action than merely a more reserved track. “Lament for Piano” does sound like a ‘last song’, and at a brief 43 minutes the music never devolves into the sort of wankery such a “music nerd” type release might imply.

The Now-Again 2009 re-issue (the original Jazzman run has already been depleted) adds three bonus tracks and provides interesting new artwork in a beautiful-looking gatefold LP. Although, you can also grab the release on CD as long as pressings of each are available.