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When you think of artists that are influenced by the musical career of Michael Jackson, who comes to mind?  Usher, Justin Timberlake, Lenny Kravitz, Enrique Iglesias, Beyonce and…Yeasayer?  Truth be told, this Brooklyn three piece takes their influence from several places.  Interviews with the band have them claiming that they would love to make well-crafted pop the way Jackson did and blend it with a lot of other sounds.  One thing is for sure: this album is full of sounds all of which have their place.

Let’s say the band Animal Collective remade Paul Simon’s classic album Graceland. If you can imagine that, you’d have Odd Blood.  The band takes African and Middle Eastern beats, dumps in some folk and adds a dash of dub for good measure.  What we get is an interesting album that kind of slows down toward the end.

Do not be thrown off by the first track ‘The Children’, it sounds heavy and sludge-like, but in the span of a few seconds we move to one of the stand-out tracks, ‘Ambling Alp’.  A friend of mine likened that track to Toto except they weren’t singing about rain in Africa.  With that rain comes a lot more influence from The Talking Heads, and the album bounces along.  The last three or four songs tend to drag a bit more and can make the album boring, yet on a whole I enjoyed listening to it in the car.

This album is fresh and makes you wonder what the next step will be for these guys.  If I were you I’d start with: ‘Ambling Alp’, ‘Madder Red’, ‘O.N.E.’ and ‘Love Me Girl’.  The album seems to peter out a bit at the end, but it is still a good listen.  If you have a chance, I’d recommend borrowing it or sticking with tracks I mentioned.