Amy Cavanaugh (cello) Russell deOcampo (keyboards, melodica, saw) Ben Hoffman (percussion) Gregory Rago (guitar, accordian)
Influences
Paul Wegener, the Ex, Tom Waits, David Byrne, Six Finger Satellite, Dog Faced Hermans, Nick Cave, Birthday Party, John Frusciante, Ennio Morricone, Mulatu Astatke, Blonde Redhead, Ricky Gervais, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Idiot Flesh, Web of Mimicry, Vaccination Records, John Fahey, La Jetee, PKD, Jim Jarmusch, Uz Jsme Doma, John Lurie, Lech Jankowski, H. Hesse, Tom Cora, Pixies, the existence of black holes, Johnny Cash, the Residents, Secret Chiefs 3, large pink font, Studio One, Artie Shaw, Solex, Charles Burns, Michel Gondry, Homelife, Ben Shahn, Tomahawk, Roy Orbison, Nomeansno, Charles Bronson/Harmonica, Stroszek
"The newly acquired razor edge to Yeveto's crepuscular instrumental rock comes from cellist Amy Cavanaugh. It's Cavanaugh's clipped, horror flick bowings that build a ceaseless tension over the short duration of "In the Water," and throughout For Stars and Atoms, Cavanaugh adds deep shadows and stark angles to Yeveto's already noirish music, important qualities for a band that originally came together to create a new score for Der Golem, a creeped-out 1920 classic of geometrically wonky silent German Expressionism. The cinema devotees in Yeveto have obviously picked up on a bunch of Expressionism's tricks--it was a movement that knew a thing or two about playing with trepidation and tranquility through the hard-core juxtaposition of light and dark--for a postrock sound that artfully avoids the clichés that have sprung up around the genre in the last decade.
But the three original members of Yeveto--Cavanaugh came on board after the score for Der Golem was completed--certainly know how to bring the drama as well. Gregory Rago's guitar is a nervous shudder of tremolo on "The Typist," a perfect title for a furtive song that sounds like it should be soundtracking the dingy Prague interiors of a Kafka short story. Ben Hoffman's evenly paced snares and crashing cymbals are a model of brooding slow-core restraint on opener "For Stars and Atoms," recalling the uneasy bridge of Mogwai's "Like Herod" or any number of Constellation Records bands that have exploited the anxious space you can build between martial drumming and pensive strings. And keyboardist Russell de Ocampo is the star of "Heart of a Dog," a brutish tango of bashed drums that builds to a nasty plume of guitar by Rago before the whole track is brusquely cut dead."
-Jess Harvell, Citypaper
