“Daughter”
from the EP Weakend
2010
Jonny Rogoff didn’t meet the other members of Yuck until after he flew across the world to join the band. The kind of guy who was always more comfortable behind a drum kit than a desk, Rogoff left the collegiate life at William Patterson University in Wayne, N.J. six weeks into his freshman year after a call from his friend, a guitar player named Daniel Blumberg, who he’d met while living on a kibbutz in Israel the year before. Formerly of Cajun Dance Party, Blumberg was starting a new band and they needed a drummer. Rogoff fit the bill, and so he jetted over to England to join Blumberg and his new Yuck bandmates: Bloomberg’s sister Ilana, his childhood friend Max Bloom, and Mariko Doi, who’d come to the group by way of Hiroshima, Japan.
“I basically just picked up and left New Jersey so quickly that when I got here, I don’t even think it had registered that I was in a completely different place,” Rogoff remembers. But less than a year after Yuck’s formation, UK independent label Transparent Records signed the band and released “Georgia,” their first single. It’s a fuzzy, atmospheric delight on which the delicate vocals sigh and soar above the guitar scuzz and Rogoff’s persistent backbeat. The band’s influences — from the psyched-out pop of the Jesus and Mary Chain to the languid rock of Pavement — are clear, and those touchstones are shared by Blumberg and Bloom’s acoustic side project, the appropriately-named Yu(c)k, which has released a cassette EP, Weakend. The title track actually feels like it was recorded in space, the band members hovering above Earth and filling the space in their astronaut helmets with gorgeous echoing vocals.
This summer, the band has played Reading and Leeds, two of the U.K.’s biggest festivals, and they’ve shared bills with Built to Spill, Dinosaur Jr, and Modest Mouse. But in faded tour snapshots posted to their blog, they could be any other young band in the world. In one photo, Rogoff and Mari stand in front of the counter at Lisa’s Ice-Cream Parlour in Fife, Scotland. They triumphantly hold up their cones of indeterminate flavor. Rogoff is a long way from home, but he’s smiling. And why wouldn’t he be? He’s eating ice cream. In Scotland. He’s in a band. He’s living his dream. “The reason that I came here was to do something that I had always dreamed of doing,” he says, “and really just to do something that I know I would always be happy and excited about.”