Music Video: “Ambling Alp,” Yeasayer’s first single off Odd Blood (Feb. 9)

We’re not going to try to beat Jon Pareles’ recent New York Times piece on Yeasayer, so we’ll offer you this clip, after a hot-off-the-presses remix of the single “Ambling Alp” from the band’s fellow Brooklynite Alan Wilkis. (Rolling Stone got in on the Yeasayer action today, too.)

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Yeasayer - Ambling Alp (Alan Wilkis Remix) [MP3]

On “Odd Blood,” due for release Feb. 9, the atmospheric, low-fi haze of the debut album is gone. The sounds of acoustic instruments and echoes of African and Celtic music are upstaged by synthesizers, samples and programming. Instead of vocal-harmony chorales and canons, there are many more straightforward solo lead vocals. There are also love songs — uneasy ones, but love songs nonetheless.

For minutes at a time a newcomer might think Yeasayer isn’t a vital part of New York City’s continuing reinvention of art-rock via world music and digital technology, a band mentioned alongside Dirty Projectors, TV on the Radio and Animal Collective and praised by indie-rock arbiters like Pitchfork Media for its “pan-ethnic spiritualism.”

When Mr. Wilder sings “Hold me like before, hold me like you used to” in the song “O.N.E.,” with drum machines and plinking, booping keyboards, Yeasayer could almost be an electropop band. (The group set aside a nearly finished version of “O.N.E.” because it “sounded too much like a beer commercial,” Mr. Tuton said.)

Yeasayer revamped itself with conceptual intent. “It was only natural to find the specific elements, the defining elements, of the last record and to eliminate those and create holes,” Mr. Keating said. “Then you had to fill those holes in with other stuff that we like, which is a lot of electronic, dance-inspired production and cool synthetic tones that haven’t been heard before.”