Sometimes it is hard to portray your music on its album cover. For John Andrews & The Yawns, that seems to be no problem on “Bad Posture”. Back porch music if there ever was one. I’m not sure what the bad posture refers to. Maybe if you try to fit the whole band on such small porch it is hard to play.
No playing problems either here. Andrews, who’s also the member of The Woods and plays the drums for Quilts, didn’t have any problems playing all the instruments on his first album under the Yawns moniker. Probably wouldn’t have either on this, his second, but still, he decided to have a real band back I’m up here.
I guess that is why the music has this natural flow a band sound should be like. And when I say the band, I also mean The Band. While the sound doesn’t really resemble that much that of the legends, it has that earthy, homegrown timber perfect for Sunday mornings, or any morning for that matter.
You can sense all the music that inspired Andrews here, but he integrates them into his vision quite effortlessly and naturally, so you don’t really care. In a word, that early Seventies folk rock sound gets a true twenty-first-century re-make the way it should be done.
Although Andrews’ voice is somewhat pushed back in the mix, you can even get a sense that his lyrics are no throwaways either: “you can paint with no paper/you can paint with no brush/it just takes peace of mind/it don’t take all that much,” sings Andrews in “Painting a Picture”. And you get it. The picture, that is.
Actually, it is also the song that brings him the closest to that “The Band feel”. I don’t know whether he did it intentionally or not, but he got it, and that is a true achievement in itself.
All in all, a big “little” album, that has instantly landed on my “Sunday” pile.
