Yum-Yum

Chris Holmes, a multi-instrumentalist based in Chicago, launched the brief-lived Yum-Yum as his vehicle for dabbling across multiple styles without committing to or mastering any single one. The sole consistent participant in Yum-Yum, Holmes had earlier served as principal songwriter for Sabalon Glitz, a lesser-known Chicago post-rock outfit drawn to 1970s Krautrock and the classic British series Doctor Who. Yum-Yum took an alternate path, drawing cues from chamber-pop acts such as Cardinal and the High Llamas; Holmes adopted the persona of an overly self-serious English-literature graduate student and composed material modeled on the Beach Boys, Nick Drake, and Belle & Sebastian, though he lacked the melodic gifts of the first pair while matching the latter’s cloying affectation. Onstage he performed alongside a string section and a French-horn player.

Atlantic’s short-lived Tag Records subsidiary signed Yum-Yum in late 1995. Produced by Chicago fixture David Trumfio of the Pulsars, the project’s sole album, Dan Loves Patti, appeared in spring 1996 amid an intensive marketing campaign. Sales fell short of 10,000 units; Atlantic terminated the contract and Yum-Yum disbanded. Holmes next embraced electronica by forming Ashtar Command. The narrative might have concluded there, yet in March 1998 Holmes’s childhood friend and one-time roommate Thomas Frank contributed a ten-page Harper’s Magazine piece in which Holmes asserted that Yum-Yum had been conceived simultaneously as an ironic jest and a calculated bid to manufacture a slyly satirical mainstream success. (Chamber pop, of course, never achieved significant commercial traction.) A pointed parody of the Backstreet Boys might have served that goal more effectively. The retrospective reframing failed to gain traction; associates connected to the project maintained that Holmes had earnestly sought mainstream success, yet Yum-Yum remains, regardless of motive, merely an agreeable sidenote within the swiftly eclipsed mid-1990s indie-pop niche.