Yeasayer - "Red Cave". Sometimes you can tell from the start. The winter's not even come yet, it's not here, and already we can tell. I saw a single snowflake, today, drift past the window on the seventeenth floor. But I know, all of us here already know: This is going to be an amazing season. It's going to be a season of thrust and parry, of joy and midnight, of frost and powder. It's going to be marvelous. Something about the smell in the air and the tenor of the clouds. Hearing Yeasayer for the first time, writing about them in May, I had the sense: they've not even arrived yet and I already know that they'll arrive. Not just that "2080" is an amazing song, likely my favourite of the year, but that this is a group that will amount to something. "PAY ATTENTION," I said. I saw them play live in Montreal and they hollered all at once and the drummer slapped his drumpads and I snapped my fingers like I was remembering something long forgotten. Even now, with All Hour Cymbals released, not quite the record I hoped it would be, I can still tell: this isn't a soundalike, a novelty, a flash in pan. The members of Yeasayer have never played in other bands and they won't ever have to. They are still learning but even now they see things in the air that most of us don't see; all they have to do is learn to seal these insights onto wax, onto tape, and to leave the lesser visions in the ether. Saying fewer things, but in just as many colours. "Red Cave" is five minutes of love, of friendship & family, of hearth and home. It's a procession to the safest place there is - to the sanctuary, the grotto, the den, where the chants hang like streamers and the drums beat like hearts. If you die in Graceland, you're reborn here, with new grass under your toes.

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