Timeless, and yet always fresh: utterly oblivious of any wiles of the pop business, Planet Yello has been turning on its orbit for nearly fifty years, plunging us into a world where past and future are one and James Bond joins forces with the Man in the Moon, Dionysos and Philip K. Dick.
“To the future, through the past,” declares Dieter Meier. With their fifteenth studio album “Time Lab”, Dieter Meier and Boris Blank put this maxim into practice more than ever. Blank constructs his imaginary soundtracks from a combination of freshly minted samples and a deep dip into his archive, which in the course of nearly fifty years of incessant creativity has accumulated innumerable song fragments, riffs and motifs. Meier then arrives to uncover the tales of anarchic romance, absurd robberies and Dadaist adventure hidden away in these parallel worlds of sound. Any Yello track is therefore by definition old and new at the same time.
The perfect illustration of this vision is the first single “Around the Sun”. It is based on an unused Meier recording from the early days of Yello that had been dropped at the last minute from their second album “Claro Que Si” (1981). Blank gave the typically sonorous Meier vocal a new setting – resulting in a thoroughly Yello-esque and percussion-driven melange of past and present, suffused with a dreamy sense of wanderlust and yearning. “Break Out”, too, contains elements that can be traced all the way back to the band’s early work: a tigerishly prowling bass riff, wall-rattling percussion and storyteller Meier in hypnotic top form.
Time begins where it ends, or vice versa. Or, as Boris Blank puts it: “Yello doesn’t really know the meaning of time.”
