Yot Club
Simpleton
AMUSE
There’s a particular sort of numbing that comes with being raised in American suburbia—you’re disconnected from both the humanistic spontaneity that bursts from life in a city and the natural wonder found in the countryside. The comfort and monotony of the suburbs comes at the expense of empathy and, frankly, any real grasp on a world outside the cookie-cutter cul-de-sac you ride your bike around. Yot Club’s Ryan Kaiser prefers the metaphor of a mirage. His third album Simpleton takes the LA-based musician back to his first encounter with this minivan-strewn apparition as he critiques, ponders, and wrestles with America’s suburbs.
Littered with existential concerns about what is truly real versus carefully curated presentation, Simpleton explores what it means to question an upbringing designed to evade such questioning. Album standout “Bones” presents a melancholy reflection on whether music was the right path to take after the panoramic illusion of his surroundings had been shattered. A wailing chorus of “I can’t feel the same again down to my bones” escapes Kaiser’s lips as he ruminates on whether a career as a songwriter is the least harmful path he can take to pay his bills. The instrumentation is similarly sobering, with a daze of electric guitar harmonies transmitting the central mirage in sonic form.
Throughout the project, Kaiser hits on quintessential aspects of suburbia as he dissects the shimmering façade from the reality underneath. “Romantacization” targets the portraits hanging on the wall of every suburban home that give the impression of familial happiness without providing any context or real honesty about the depictions. On “Honor Roll,” Kaiser croons about the doctrinal nature of schooling where lessons like “don’t be last” and “don’t be crass” are hammered home through a reward/punishment system straight out of classical conditioning literature. Woozy rock textures give the impression of a partial eclipse, dimming sunshine-infused surf rock into a subdued haze more suited for the turmoil.
Wrapping up Simpleton is “Uphill Road,” a winding ballad that acts as a microcosm of the project as a whole. Kaiser muses about the NPCs that float around him and the comfort of the TV screen in his home, attempting to convince himself of the safety of the mirage: “Everything is fake, but I don’t care.” Even just by contemplating existential matters, however, Kaiser has already opened the can of worms. With the desperate repetition of the line “It’s not that deep,” he tries in vain to keep the mirage in place, but the mist is already dissipating and the BPM is picking up. Kaiser takes the last minute and a half of Simpleton to let his glowing brand of indie-surf instrumentals rock. It’s a well-deserved break for the songwriter, who can now dissociate to work through the suburban reality that Yot Club has uncovered.
