Yeah OK $1.65

About Yeah OK

Portland, Maine based acoustic indie artist Steven Williams’ music has been described many ways, from melodic pop to acoustic indie to math rock to atmospheric and beautiful. On “Yeah OK”, Steven pulls influences from many genres including straight up rock & roll to jazz to folk to reggae hip hop to math rock to post hardcore to create a truly unique sounding CD full of beautifully arranged acoustic-indie pop pieces. As a live artist, Williams is known for beautifully composed and layered loop-based music based around picked, strummed, percussed and bowed acoustic guitars, and this CD recreates 11 of his better live looped tracks in full studio arranged versions, with assisitance from several local musical luminaries including Dead End Armory drummer Chris Dibiasio, ex-Strange Pleasure and current Line of Force bassist Matt Hansen, ex-Babaloo trumpeter Marc Chillemi, ex-Subject Bias bassist and singer Katrina Abramo, and the man of many talents, Line of Force’s own Frank Hopkins, who also mixed the CD at his Portland Sweet Dream Recording studio.

Of “Yeah OK”:
”A work of art. Really strong all the way through.” –Dominic Lavoie, Dominic & The Lucid and WBLM-FM.

“This is some of the richest sounding, most skillfully layered, acoustic-indie stuff I've heard come out of the local scene since The Ponys made Shishimumu four years ago.” –Sean Wilkinson, thebollard.com.

Steven Williams' musical influences are pretty varied and include everything from post-punk/post-hardcore 80's style alternative music to modern slowcore, experimental atmospheric guitar stuff, and electronic pop. Often compared to the likes of Iron & Wine, Death Cab for Cutie and Andrew Bird, Steven's (perhaps) biggest strength as a musical artist lies with his talent for melodies and the arrangement of orchestrated comositions, which is pretty evident with "Yeah OK", an album filled with lushly arranged pieces featuring some dozen or more instruments. It's a talent developed from several years and dozens of compositions based around on-the-fly looped songs, ala Andrew Bird or, technically if not stylistically, Howie Day. "Yeah OK", in fact, grew largely organically; it took a solid year to complete, and most of the tracks went through multiple re-arrangements and embellishments along the way. Whatever the song felt like it was becoming, was what it became, hence the spinning array of styles from the hip hop and reggae influenced "Good Idea" to the electronic sounding "Trains" to the countrified "Crime" to the R&B and soul tinged "Tonight You Win".