Yes Giantess! Interview by Christopher Hay

Yes Giantess!
‘We’re serious about having fun!’

‘Yes Giantess is about to get uncomfortably close to your girlfriend!’ Quite an audacious claim for a small band from Boston, USA. But after just a few listens to their achingly cool synth-pop music, the band’s charm is undeniable. Boys, lock up your girlfriends, because anyone lucky enough to see this band live will go weak at the knees and be swept away by their energy, sense of fun and enormous pop choruses. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Fresh from releasing ‘Tuff n Stuff’, the infectious feel-good soundtrack to many a euphoric summer sunset, Yes Giantess are in Newcastle. They’re playing the opening slot of the NME Radar Tour, and are determined to have a great time doing it. ‘It’s like getting hit in the face with a Red Bull!’ drummer Joey succinctly says of the band’s live act. Frontman Jan elaborates: ‘It’s a point of pride for us to be extremely energetic and just really happy to be on stage. We’ve moved past the point where we can watch a band play with frowns on their faces. And that’s pretty much where the idea for our live show started.’

‘The whole thing started with Jan just writing the songs for fun, and then my roommate and I just started producing them for fun. And we don’t wanna lose that. Even though we’re taking it more seriously now, we don’t wanna lose that energy of not taking ourselves too seriously,’ Karl, the band’s laptop magician, explains. ‘We’re very serious about fun!’ Guzzling sugary sweets while slumped in their chairs with their hoods up, at first the strains of a week on tour seem to have taken their toll. But tiredness quickly gave way to childish excitement. The four-piece’s enthusiasm for what they do is contagious. Jan’s eyes light up when he’s given the chance to talk about their music: ‘We wanna be in the crowd, really! If we could play on the floor, we would!’ he admits, and he you can tell he really means it.

Yes Giantess’s joyful music is constantly being compared to the likes of MGMT and Passion Pit, the forerunners of the new synth-pop movement. ‘Passion Pit are good friends of ours and they’ve been nothing but really wonderful to us – we’re nothing but thankful to them,’ Jan explains. But perhaps tiring of these easy comparisons, in an inspired thirty seconds the band bounces off each other to concoct a brilliantly surreal description of their music that the Mighty Boosh would be proud of:

Jan: [Our sound is like] early Prince meets C+C Music Factory on a beach at sunset. They run at each other in slow motion…
Karl: It’s on a beach on Mariah Carey’s private island…
Jan: …They jump into the air, time seems to stop. They high five, their hands connect, and the ripple of the clap echoes throughout the island.
Karl: And at that moment, fireworks explode…
Chase: …and a pop-child is born!
Karl: And then Journey flies by in a spaceship!

Beat that. And when asked what animal Yes Giantess would be, ‘a rainbow coloured unincorn!’ ‘a fucking wolf!’ and ‘Falkor, the good luck dragon from The Neverending Story!’ were the responses. Still not sure about these guys? Listen to how they chose their name: ‘Basically we were sitting round a kitchen table watching a video – it’s not really porn, more a ‘special interest’ video – and it was of a small man trying to leave his house. But he couldn’t leave his house because a giantess wouldn’t let him. He was going ‘Please can I go?’ and she was like, ‘NO!’ And it was just became one of those endearing jokes that stayed with us, and when we started out as a band, we were like, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s the name!’’ Obviously.

So porn aside, what’s the source of Yes Giantess’s seemingly bottomless pool of inspiration? They recently released an 80s-heavy mixtape on their myspace page featuring tracks from the likes of Journey, Aha and Michael Jackson. ‘Its strange because I don’t necessarily wake up and turn Journey on, but that mixtape is all about appreciation and about respect. We’re pretty much huge fans of everyone on the tape,’ Jan explains. What did they make of Michael Jackson’s death? A communal shout of ‘Denial!’ echoes through the hallway of Northumbria Students Union. ‘It’s amazing, people die every few minutes and then this one person dies and the entire world just stops. It showed how much power he had.’ ‘Joey, didn’t your mum send you a really cute email saying, ‘You guys have got to carry on his legacy!’’ Karl helpfully pipes up. Yes, Joey admits, she did…

The band have toured with dance acts like MSTRKRFT and Calvin Harris, a clear indicator of the direction their music is taking. ‘Yeah we do align ourselves with that genre,’ Jan admits, ‘but our material is definitely ‘band’ material. It’s dancey, but it’s not strictly ‘club electro’, its definitely still got a ‘band’ sound.’ After an E.P. release on November 4th, we’ll be able to judge for ourselves when the eagerly anticipated debut album is released in early 2010. It might surprise fans of their early work, Jan argues. ‘As we go into nicer studios, as we work with different producers, the sound’s changing. I’m sure the album is gonna sound a lot different from our original single releases.’ He draws on MGMT as an example of a like-minded band progressing their sound: ‘When they first started, they were a laptop/iPod type band, but when they signed their record deal, the first thing they decided to do with the money was to get an orchestra. It was baffling to me at the time but I see now that it makes total sense, thinking about what they are now – they’re kind of a psyche-rock band, a big arena sound, so different from their original electro.’

Talking of arenas, can Yes Giantess ever imaging themselves playing stadium gigs? After instant excitement at the idea, Joey gives a typically measured reply. ‘It’d be cool to do, but a lot of the fun of making music in front of people is being attached to those people. When you get into arena gigs it’s so impersonal, so far away.’ Karl agrees, ‘We’re making this very mainstream pop music and a lot of other artists associated with doing that are superstar types – Madonna, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga – massive, untouchable people, and we don’t want to be like that. We wanna be personably accessible.’

Whether Yes Giantess will outgrow such commendable ideals will become clear soon enough. More incredible live performances such as the one they gave here in Newcastle will ensure that crowds of a couple of hundred will become crowds of thousands. Despite playing at 7pm to a surprisingly sparse crowd, from the first beat of ‘Words’ until the last beat of ‘Tuff n Stuff’, the band played as if their life depended on it. The set was frantic, exuberant, contagious. The band smiled, jumped and danced. Right on cue, the crowd did exactly the same. Surely the only people in the venue left disappointed were the next band on stage. It’s safe to say that Yes Giantess defines the term ‘hard act to follow’. But soon, they won’t be needing to follow anyone.