Music without words: Promising local band Yeobo debuts with video at Flintstone House

Last week, I had the thrill of seeing the mind-blowing trio Khruangbin perform live at Berkeley’s amazing Greek Theatre. It was a lot of money and a lot of driving, but for a lot less of both, I can now see another trio walking the same path as Khruangbin — three musicians, only drum, bass and guitar, no vocals, a chill psychedelic groove that can send you soaring. 

The band is called Yeobo — that’s a Korean term of endearment similar to “sweetheart,” pronounced yo-bo. And they’re playing Friday at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz. On top of that, the Monterey/Santa Cruz-based band has just released an amazing new video that’s likely to catch eyeballs all over the Bay Area.

Yeobo’s instrumental sound occupies a space somewhere between Khruangbin and Santa Cruz’s glorious surf-rockers The Mermen, for fans who like their music to take them places. In the case of Yeobo, one of those places is the fabled Flintstone House in Hillsborough. The band wanted to shoot a video for their new song “Danny’s Walk,” and to their astonishment, the owners allowed them to do it. The result is a kind of insider’s peek at one of the Bay Area’s most bizarre attractions. 

“They were really friendly,” said Higgins, “and really helpful.”

The Flintstone House is a private residence on the Peninsula, famously visible from the northbound lanes of Interstate 280. It was built almost 50 years ago as a kind of experimental new architectural style, but in recent years, the house’s owners have embraced its whimsical nickname. The band reached out to the house’s owners, got permission for the project, and shot the video on site on a Saturday.

Yeobo’s drummer is Santa Cruzan Jenn Cain, while the other two players, bassist Glenn Bell and guitarist Kee Hyon Higgins, hail from Monterey. Higgins is a former pastor and lapsed musician who, during the COVID pandemic, made the choice to reengage with his love of music. He heard just a bit of a Khruangbin song in a bumper between news stories on NPR, then followed where it led him.

“I love minimalism, whether it’s art, music or architecture, and you just don’t see a lot of instrumental groups, unless it’s orchestral or jazz,” Higgins said. “When there’s no words, as a listener, you’re just interpreting it — the sounds, the rhythms, the colors.”

Higgins, 38, said that, as a guitarist, he was inspired by U2’s iconic album “The Joshua Tree,” especially the work of the band’s guitarist The Edge. “It was always very simple,” he said of The Edge’s guitar work. “I was always drawn to the simplicity of it, of not overdoing it.”

Higgins grew up in the church, and eventually became a pastor. But the pandemic disrupted his church life and he rediscovered his love of the guitar. “That chapter of my life [as a pastor] came to an end, and I started looking for other things,” he said. “I was, like, I need to play music again.” He hooked up with Bell, a prominent jazz/reggae/rock bassist in Monterey, and found Cain, the band’s drummer, on Craigslist. They began exploring textures and colors that could come out of instrumental music in the simple trio setup. Khruangbin was an obvious influence, as was the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio and Hermanos Gutierrez.

On the heels of “Danny’s Walk,” Yeobo is planning to release another single by the end of the year, and then a full album sometime in the spring of 2025. The massive success of Khruangbin gives the band inspiration that there is an audience for pure music without vocals.

“It was just a snippet, around 20 seconds or so,” said Higgins of his first encounter with Khruangbin on NPR. “And it kinda made me fall in love with music again. I thought, ‘All right, this is a good vibe, I can go with this.’ And it gives us hope that people really like music without words.”

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