Arthur Yoria, After You

Damn. I’ve been thinking back and realized that it’s been two damn decades since I first heard Arthur Yoria play and sing — I think it was back when he was with late-’90s pop band Lavendula — which says something both about how old I feel these days and, much more importantly, how seasoned and accomplished a musician and songwriter Yoria is.

He made his home here in Houston for several years after graduating from the University of Houston, relentlessly cranking out music and playing every chance he got, bouncing from genre to genre and back again seemingly at a whim but always managing to make something new and different in the process. Over time, though, he came to the realization that he wasn’t going to explode into something bigger by just playing shows around here.

Yoria left town in 2010 and spent the next six years roaming the country, staying for a while in California, in Colorado, in Brooklyn, elsewhere in Texas, and probably another several places I’m not aware of in-between; he was a true nomad, making his way across the land and playing music wherever he could.

On new album After You, he chronicles that journey in “Fuel The Fight,” singing, “I’ve been here, I’ve been there / I’ve been everywhere / And in each town I get the sense / that I belong there / Oh, if only only for one night / these people treat me right / that’s enough to fuel the fight.” From the sound of it, his travels both opened his eyes to the goodness of folks all over and, maybe, made him realize how lonely that nomadic life could be.

And so, he’s back, having returned to our little-big city in 2016 and quietly re-establishing himself in a music scene that’s pretty radically different from the one he left.

Judging by After You, the time away was time well-spent. Yoria’s always been one hell of a songwriter, but the songs here feel more fully fleshed-out than a lot of his earlier stuff, even albums I still love like 2003’s I’ll Be Here Awake and 2007’s Handshake Smiles. The songs have more dimensions, more nuances, to them, more layers of sound piled up carefully so they build and build into something that you can’t pick apart on just one listen; this album’s decidedly not just a quick one-and-done, smile-and-forget listen, but rather something you hear, and then go back to hear again because you’re pretty sure you missed this part or that part.

Beyond that, this time around Yoria feels like he’s matured as a musician, as a songwriter, even as a human being. When he left us, he was still holding tight to youth, in a way — while I liked his previous full-length, 2009’s (281), quite a bit at the time, looking back I find myself cringing a bit and figuring the guy must’ve been smoking a shitload of weed back then. It’s good, yes, but also kind of a mess, all scruffy around the edges and more than a little wasted.

Just about ten years on, we see/hear an Arthur Yoria who’s looking at the world with clear eyes, and looking far, far outside himself. Take the soulful, heartfelt “Mother And Son,” for one thing, which I think is a mother singing to her child on the day he decides to marry the person he loves; it’s beautiful and stately, full of warmth and restrained sadness all at once. When the mother/narrator/singer promises she’ll always be with her son, no matter where life goes, dammit, I’m nearly weeping right at my desk.

Then there’s the aforementioned “Fuel The Fight,” a friendly, wide-open folk-country tune that rambles and rolls like the best traveling songs you’ve ever heard, where Yoria talks about his roaming ways and how he connects with strangers. “I Just Want To Sit Here,” for its part, is more stationary (heck, it’s even in the title), about just staying in place for a while and catching one’s breath. The music matches that, as well, delicately swooning, with a rhythm that’s equal parts roots-rock and fragile, romantic dancefloor pop.

There’s a surprising starkness to “Jimmy’s In The Ghetto,” which is hazy, drifting, almost bubbly-sounding pop despite the fact that it’s about a guy getting addicted to crack and getting busted by the police. In contrast, opener “Maybe” is sweet and regretful, bumping and almost samba-ish, with a languid vibe that brings to mind David Garza’s classic This Euphoria and bits that make me think of early-early Arcade Fire (back when they were good, I mean). Closing track “We Can’t Lose” is similar, pretty and affirming, promising that despite the suffering and tears, the protagonist and his audience (whoever it might be on that track; it’s not clear) can’t lose.

On lead single “Wishlist,” Yoria melds an Americana-ish sound with a funky bassline to craft a tune that’s ambling, busy, and playful, and more than a little bit self-deprecating; at one point, he pokes fun at himself by muttering “Preposition, noun” where another item should go in a list of things.

I also get a bit of that playful feel with the slow-moving, dramatic, spaghetti-Western-esque “Lagarto,” which sees Yoria creeping right up next to your ear to whisper…well, I have no idea what. I know “lagarto” is “lizard” in Spanish, but I’m afraid my actual comprehension of Spanish is near-nonexistent. Either way, it’s a damn good song, with its stop-start rhythms and orchestral flourishes beneath Yoria’s Spanish-language vocals.

Out of all the tracks on After You, however, it’s a song Yoria didn’t write that truly caught me off-guard. Midway through the album, there’s a jangly, folky, almost jaunty cover of Misfits classic “Last Caress,” which is grim material on a good day but which threw me off with a lyrical change in the second line to “I raped a swimmer today.”

It threw me off pretty thoroughly…until I re-read the sub-title to the song, “(Dedicated to Dan and Brock Turner)”. With that, things clicked into place — Brock Turner, for those who haven’t had a television or read a paper in the past decade, is/was the Stanford University swimmer who raped an unconscious woman on the college campus and was sentenced to six months in jail for it. Dan Turner is the guy’s father, who’s tried to argue away his son’s crime at least twice in the past couple of years. Both, in my estimation, are complete assholes.

Listening again, the song I’d first pegged to as a light-hearted bit of “hey, it’s a musician covering a song that’s totally outside his genre!” into a quiet-yet-sharp-edged condemnation of modern-day rape culture, with Yoria throwing in a bit of acid sarcasm. I think it’s now my favorite version of “Last Caress,” even beating the Metallica cover I grew up listening to.

Taken as a whole, After You is smart, beautiful, and subtle, hitting all the right notes, keeping the songs simple enough to stick in your brain but complex enough to warrant repeated listening. This is the sound of a man who finally, finally knows exactly who he is and what he wants out of life, and that’s a place a lot of us never manage to reach.

(Feature photo by Jay Dryden.)