With the release of their acclaimed debut album, All Hour Cymbals last November, Yeasayer has been a name on the lips of a growing number of music fans. The band was formed by school friends Chris Keating and Anand Wilder in 2005. Quickly inducing Wilder’s cousin, Ira Wolf Tuton, on bass they experimented with live drums, a drum machine and even an iPod to provide percussion before hiring Luke Fasano to complete the line up a year later. However, the drummer had reservations about joining after the band attempted to explain their sound to him.

“They described it to me like, ‘Well it’s like this world music, hip hop influenced, kind of like Indian, Gospel, Asian, you know, pop, it’s pop music’. I was like, ‘wow, this could be the most terrible thing that I’ve ever heard’”, says Fasano. But the description was enough to at least pique his interest. “I listened to what they were doing and I was immediately like, ‘OK yes, I wanna do that’”.

So, it’s clear from the outset that this isn’t an easy band to pitch, but Fasano insists that the key to Yeasayer’s success is a love of good, old-fashioned pop music.

“That was what they told me from the get-go”, he continues, explaining the Yeasayer ethos, “We all listen to pop radio but we all try to draw as many other things into that as possible because who wants to hear the same song you’ve heard for the past 20 years? We’re trying to take all those elements that would make an interesting pop song that are in some Iraqi folk song, or in some Moroccan song, or West African song, or Indian song. These can be in a Western pop song, there’s no reason why they can’t”.

Despite these bold ideas, the songs start from fairly simple beginnings and slowly take shape as the band come together to work on them. Fasano explains: “I’ll write something on keyboard or Chris will put something together on his computer. Ira will write guitar parts, as well as clarinet and saxophone parts. Anand plays the cello and like five different things, he can kinda play everything. Then we take samples of other things and just put as dense layering as we think the song will support”.

With such an array of sounds on their recordings, performing the songs live does mean the band have their work cut out. Fasano explains: “Honestly, this is really the most musically ambitious group that, I think, any of us have ever had the pleasure to work with. There’s just four of us, but everyone is singing; I do the backing vocals and the three across the front are pretty much always doing harmonies. Chris does main vocals, but then he’s also playing a keyboard and a sampler. Ira has about ten different pedals for his bass; sometimes it sounds like he’s playing a flute and sometimes it’s like an organ. Anand has a keyboard and a sampler, as well as his guitar. Then I have the drum set and an electronic drum pad, which is a sampler, as well. So, we’re all doing two or three different things”.

Despite having so much to keep in mind already, Yeasayer are keen to give their audience something special when they play live and have various different versions of each of their songs to choose from each night. “We still rewrite our songs to play them live”, says Fasano. “When I see a band live and there’s no change I’m sort of like, ‘well why did I come here today?’ You don’t feel like there’s any interaction between the artist and the audience”.

This passion to give the best performance possible – and the ability to deliver it – make Yeasayer our absolute must-see band at this year’s Great Escape. Catch them at The Barfly and The Pressure Point on the 15 and 16 May respectively.

Yeasayer at The Great Escape, Barfly, 15 May & The Pressure Point, 16 May.