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YUM

Duo that makes firm electro-rock with heavy influences from the eighties, in which this cold sound is made warm by the voice of singer Lennerd Busé, or as the record company puts it "an original and touching mix of elements from the past decades".

 
Songs
 

"Happy"
43 sec. - 85 Kb.
song : Busé, D'haene
Productie : Yum, Gary Langan
Jaar : 2000
Record co. : Sony

"Caught it alive"
55 sec. - 109 Kb.
song : Busé, D'haene
Productie : Yum, Gary Langan
Jaar : 2001
Record co. : Sony

"Fake"
43 sec. - 85 Kb.
song : Busé, D'haene
Productie : Yum, Gary Langan.
Jaar : 2001
Record co. : Sony

 
   

The band Yum came into being during the course of 1998, when Reinert d'Haene (drummer for the formation Ashbury Faith) helped out on the production of a band called The Bliss. This is where he ran into the Canadian/Dutch singer Lennerd Busé, and because there was an immediate musical and friendly bond between the two, Yum was born.

Somewhat later, the two started recording stuff on their own, and put it on a Minidisc that was sent to some record companies. For this, the duo dressed up the songs that were originally written on acoustic guitar with electronics of Reinert's brother Geert. This low-budget solution to get a fuller sound for the duo, later on became somewhat of their trademark. The demo was also handed out to A&R people of Sony Belgium, who later on turned out to be enthusiastic enough about it to sign the band.

 

In the meantime however, D'Haene & Busé hadn't been lying around, as they had been recording their songs in the studio of brother broer Geert (with the goal to make a cd they would issue themselves). With the Sony-interest in the band, things got a little more ambitious, and Gary Langan (one of the founders of Art of Noise, and producer of countless bands such as ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Scritti Politti, The The ...) was sent in by the record company. Langan didn't get full control over the production, but he did steer the sound of the band in a slightly different direction in the Ace-Studio in Aartselaar. "There was a proposition to re-record the entire album from the ground up, but we chose to work with the original recordings to keep the original feeling", Reinert told MIXnMusic.

The result was a sort of pop-rock-dance-eighties-wave hybrid on the first full-cd. Reinert about this to de Standaard : "I have often thought that the band risked "falling in between two chairs": too poppy for the alternative audience, and too loud for the mainstream. How do you sell that. Where to place that in the musical environment? But since elektronics are so widely used these days, the audience has widened their mind." And in De Morgen : "We were planning on self-releasing the album, as we were quite convinced no record company would have us. But then it turned out the market is now open for such things: see Das Pop, Zita Swoon or Ozark Henry. Three fantastic bands that use elektronics in their own way within their music!".

 
In 2000 the first officials signs of life for the band were sent out, as the song "Happy" was taken aboard the soccer movie "Team Spirit" (also on Sony). A bit later, this track was also released as a (promo)-single, shortly afterwards followed by "Caught it Alive". In april 2001 the full cd bearing the title CD Monokid (which apparently means "single child that is raised by a single parent") was ready and got officially presented in the AB-club, a live show that received the well-known "mixed feelings" from the press. De Morgen for example wrote "the emphatic synthesizer-layer under most songs got quite tiresome after a while, but the crystal clear vocals and inventive drumming made up for that. The everpresent eighties-references (such as Yazoo and Nik Kershaw in "Green Lightbulbs", or A-ha in "Happy") risk to brand YUM as more of a gimmick than a band." However, a few months later the excellent single "Fake" got issued, the breakthough became a fact (mainly thru a top 10 in de Afrekening) and Yum came to be one of the Belgian revelations of that spring.
Striking though that the typically synth-swollen tracks as "Happy" and "Caught it Alive" didn't really catch the public & radio-ear, and that the breaktrough came instead with the much more conventional/emotional "Fake". "The successor could be situated in all kind of directions", acknowledged Reinert in MixNMusic : "Lennerds voice is so strong that this gives us so much more freedom on the musical side of things. His voice ties it all up".

In the summer of 2001, the band was candidate for a place as the "People's Choice" at the Beach Festival in Zeebrugge.

Members :
- Lennard Busé (vocals)
- Reinert d'Haene (drums)
live also:
- Geert d'Haene (keyboards)
- Matthias van der Hallen (guitar)

Buy CD's of this band at proxis

Albums :
- Happy (CDS, Sony, 2000)
- Caught it Alive (CD, Sony, 2001)
- Monokid (CD, Sony, 2001)
- Fake (CDS, Sony, 2001)

Websites :
- Yum-music.com is the official site
- Yum on the soundtrack of the movie Team Spirit
- Zap.to/yum, an early fansite
- Yum-special atMSN (aussi en français)
- Pictures of Yum during the recording of Monokid at ACE-studio's
- Interview with Reinert & Lennard in streaming video at Canal Plus

Forum :
- Read the messages about Yum
- Add your message, question, cd- or concertreview ... about Yum in the Forum

 

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Dirk Houbrechts stopped working at The Belgian Pop & Rock Archives (you can read his personal statement here). The website is now entrusted to the Flanders Music Centre (www.muziekcentrum.be). Contact: webmaster@muziekcentrum.be.

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Last update to this site : December 2001.

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