Yello: Time Lab (2LP)

Timeless—and yet always fresh: Regardless of the whims of the pop industry, Planet Yello has been making the rounds for nearly fifty years, whisking us away time and again to a world where the past and the future meet, and James Bond teams up with the Man in the Moon, Dionysus, and Philip K. Dick. “To the future, through the past”: With their fifteenth studio album, *Time Lab*, Dieter Meier and Boris Blank are putting this maxim into musical practice more than ever before. With passionate attention to detail, Blank crafts his imaginary soundtracks from fresh samples and found material from his own archive, where a vast selection of sound fragments, riffs, and motifs has accumulated over nearly fifty years of creative work. Meier plunges into these parallel soundscapes and discovers within them his romantic tales of outlaws, mysterious nocturnal figures, and Dadaist wordplay. Essentially, every Yello track is both ancient and brand-new at the same time. This principle is perfectly illustrated by the first single, “Around the Sun.” It is based on a previously unused Meier recording that was dropped from the selection for “Claro Que Si” (1981) at the last minute. Blank gave Meier’s resonant voice a fresh sonic makeover—the result is an elegant and flexible, thoroughly Yello-esque blend of past and present, romantic wanderlust, and driving percussion. “Break Out” also plays with stylistic elements that can be traced back to Yello’s earliest days: a dangerously prowling bass riff, fiery percussion, and Meier the storyteller in hypnotic top form. Time begins where it ends—or vice versa. Or, as Boris Blank puts it: “Yello’s music doesn’t really know time.”