Yoo Doo Right: four against five, and the groove wins
The Montréal band's fourth record runs on a rhythmic disagreement, drums in 4 against guitar in 5, and hands the last word to a lap steel.
BY JOLT Staff · NOV 13 2026 · 3 min readBuild and Rest by the Shepherd's Light runs on a disagreement: drums in 4, guitar in 5, neither side giving ground until it suits them. Yoo Doo Right's fourth album, out 6 November on Mothland, gives it eight tracks. The argument is good. The proof arrives early, and the record then has to live with having shown its hand.
The Montréal band share a name with the closing track of Can's 1969 debut, Monster Movie, twenty minutes cut down from a six-hour improvisation. Intention or not, it frames them correctly. Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose landed in 2021, A Murmur, Boundless to the East in 2022, From the Heights of Our Pastureland in 2024, and 2025 brought a collaboration with Nolan Potter, Yoo II.
“This song has been a staple live for a while.”
The record exists in two forms this month: the album, and a session the band played earlier this year at Crouch End Studios, a room in the mews of an old dairy farm in North London. What they chose to play there was the second track, "Doldrums, Doldrums, Eviler Than the Devil". That choice tells you where the band think the centre of the record is.
The engine of that song is easy to describe and harder to play: John Talbot and Justin Cober layering drums in 4 against guitar in 5 until the mismatch stops reading as friction. It has been a live staple long enough that the studio version had to justify itself, and it does that at the end, where the whole thing releases into a dampening groove and a lap steel lead takes over the top. "This song has been a staple live for a while," the pair say. That is a band refusing to treat its own crowd-pleaser as the finish line. The lap steel works as a hook rather than a resolution, and that is the difference between this band and most of the aisle it sits in.
The rest of the running order can be read off its proportions. "Two Hoarders" opens, the live staple takes the second slot, and then nine and a half minutes go to "Tortue", spelled "Torture" on the vinyl sleeve, which is either a joke or a printing decision. That is a great deal of weight placed third. "Industriestraße 9" answers it with a street address where a song title would normally sit, and then the record turns over: "Neighbours Report Their Neighbours" starts side B with a title that sounds like a form filled in at a desk, "To Be a Lambskin (Or to Be the Whole Flock)" follows it, "Sofort, Si Fort" after that, and the title track closes by taking the album's own name for itself.
What the band are good at is the deflation. Most records in this register end a long piece by getting louder; this one ends its best piece by loosening, letting the groove go soft under a pedal steel that nobody asked for and everybody will remember. It is a generous move and a slightly reckless one, because it sets a standard the remaining six tracks have to meet without the same trick available.
It is for the people who keep the long records and do not need a chorus to hold their attention: the math-rock crowd for the 4 against 5, the post-rock crowd for the patience, anyone who has stuck with Mothland. If you want the payoff inside three minutes, this is not your record, and "Tortue" will feel like a wait.
The flaw is placement, and it is real. A record whose clearest idea is the outro of track two has to spend everything after it answering back, and nine and a half minutes is a long stretch to hold a listener who has already heard the best thing on the side. The band would rather risk that slump than interrupt themselves, which is admirable and also the reason the middle of this album is the part you will argue about.
So: 3.5, a good record with a method worth more than one song, and one lap steel line that will outlast the argument about sequencing. The guitar keeps counting in five.
