“Yes Chef!” is built on a simple truth, learned at the feet of Gordon Ramsay’s televised wrath: the kitchen permits only one reply to any question. Stone has turned that surrender into a garage-rock anthem of gleeful, lunatic obedience. The title is barked and chanted and flung at the ceiling, and by the second chorus you will be flinging it too, probably at a colleague, possibly at a bus driver.<\/p>
The press release invokes Iggy Pop stumbling into the writers’ room of a reality cooking show, which sounds like hyperbole until the song starts. Stone writes, plays and produces every note herself, and the achievement is that “Yes Chef!” never sounds like a bedroom project. It sounds like a full band, sweating and scruffy and entirely unbothered by good manners, with one person standing behind the curtain pulling every lever. The garage-punk chassis is lean and hooky, the surf and pop influences glint round the edges, and the whole thing is built for shouting along, which is the correct purpose for a song of this kind.<\/p>
The influences are easy to place. The Beaches’ bratty glee is here, along with the Strokes’ studied dishevelment, the Bangles’ knack for a melody that arrives wearing a leather jacket, and Bleachers’ appetite for the big communal singalong. Yet Stone is no mere magpie. Her sensibility is her own: dry, self-aware, faintly unhinged, and entirely lacking the cynicism that sours so much knowing rock music. The lyric concerns surrender and absurdity, but it treats both as sources of joy rather than despair, and that is a harder trick than it looks.<\/span><\/p> That joy matters, because the song’s origin is a bleak one. Stone has said she was in a dark place when the *Hell’s Kitchen* marathon began, and a lesser writer would have wallowed. She has instead made a record in which the darkness is acknowledged, shrugged at and set to a drumbeat. It is catharsis delivered at volume, with a grin. Anyone who has ever stood at the sink at midnight, rehearsing a reply they will never give, will recognise the relief of a song that simply says yes, loudly, and means it.<\/span><\/p> There is a lovely stubbornness, too, in how this has been made. Fifteen years, two continents and three cities lie behind Dynasty Four, with no hired publicist, no radio team and no marketing department. The band was scattered by relocation and reunited by a pandemic, and the cheerful scrappiness of the music feels earned rather than affected. When a record carries this much hard-won affection, you want to hold the door open for it.<\/span><\/p> The good news is that the main course follows: *Imperials*, Dynasty Four’s second full-length, arrives on 2 December, more than a decade in the making.<\/span><\/p> For now, “Yes Chef!” is a small triumph of mischief, craft and nerve. Play it loud, learn the shout, and do as you’re told.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/dynastyfour.ca\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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