After fashioning a live-in vehicle from an 18-passenger van, Brendon and Jacob Broome, two brothers living in Dayton, Ohio, hit the road. Their plan was to travel, working odd jobs and playing music. “We traveled until we landed somewhere, and Oregon was the spot,” Brendon Broome tells me over the phone. 

After arriving, the siblings worked at a marijuana farm near Cottage Grove. In their spare time, they hung out in Eugene playing music as Yuvees, a trio heavily influenced by no-wave music from New York and post-punk bands from Ohio such as Pere Ubu and DEVO. 

Eventually the Broome brothers moved to Portland, expanding the band lineup to a quintet and releasing their debut EP, Seething in Whisper Town, in 2018. Yuvee’s brand new full-length, Human Dance, is out March 13 via Seattle-based label Youth Riot Records.

Tracing punk’s lineage blew Broome’s mind as a teenager. “That’s kind of the birth of weird for me. You can do anything you want. It’s so minimalistic and still sonically interesting,” he says.

For Broome, classic punk was a nice alternative to popular Dayton bands like Hawthorne Heights. “That’s some people’s thing, but I didn’t like it — it lacked sincerity to me. I wanted to make stuff that was screechy and expressive,” he says. 

In addition to punk, Ohio’s rust belt legacy influenced Broome. In the mechanized yet oddly danceable grooves — but also his trash-mouth poetry — you hear a sound fitting nicely alongside other Portland bands like The Woolen Men, Lithics and even early Modest Mouse.

Broome’s abrasive and exhilarating slide guitar style is also a reminder of Ohio’s faded industrial past, a technique borrowed from ’70s New York musician James Chance.

“We grew up in an industrial town,” Broome says. “The sound of glass breaking or metal being ripped or cut, that’s kind of like ASMR for weirdos.”

Yuvees celebrate the release of Human Dance along with Eugene’s The Critical Shakes and The Shaky Harlots 7:30 pm Sunday, March 15, at WOW Hall; $8, all-ages.

Comments are closed.