Noah from Yvette, sent me their latest single the other day, a 4 song EP from his band Yvette, of course I love the matte feel of a screen print...and on both sides of the sleeve...it's those extras on a self released single that show how much these guys care about the music inside. What we're got inside is the magical focused combination of a duo, traditional drums and random percussion elements and what might be tweaked guitar.
The A-Side, "Vibrations" has a frantic tribal drum energy like Health or These are powers...or even going back to the Liars, Drum Mountain, but this feels slightly more subtle, there's a quieter power buried under layers of these effects. The far off ghostly vocal, all broken syllables, chanted, working over the melody rhythms, this feels like all of the good parts of Animal Collective combined with a decayed bank of blinking electronics. But this isn't a case of glitchy accidental sounds ending up as ambient background feeling. They must search out this grating steel specifically to lay the heavily echoed layered vocal back, way down into the cave.
"Plussed" is an ode to ring toned, arc welding These Are Powers nightmare tones...and these guys are a duo? The layers of recording here, the chugging loops, huge room echo tom sounds, is impressively put together. None of it feels like it's being played off a laptop, so I really want to see what kind of an experience this is live.
The guitar is mostly deconstructed, hardly even a strummed string anymore, just the base wave of a vibrating string sound, a program to approximate the second hand description of a note. They've got a lot fo Black Dice up their sleeves, really unique unsettling sounds and rhythms. The shoegaze etherial vocal is maybe closer to The Soft Moon, so distant and layered it starts to not even sound like a vocal....or at least like it most definitely doesn't belong in this bladerunner back alley, it's too 'nice' soundign compared to everything else.
The B-Side, "With Fangs" has big synth teeth and ever pounding drums. Hugely hyptnotic and dark, I can't get past HEALTH's self titled record on Lovepump United and how you had no idea where that album was going, it was surprising at every turn and Yvette is able to pull off that same freedom, in four tracks they've managed to carve a huge swath out of noise that goes everywhere from the Swans to The Big Sleep. All the while kind of working in an angelic way, the vocals are equally buried and unrecognizable but essentially the harmony is deliberately opposite rhythmically and instrumentally from the obviously human parts.
On "Less" they have this synthetic sound so completely nailed, the drums recorded perfectly huge, I'm convinced they have carved out their own variation of ghost punk...like this swirling distortion effect on crash cymbals? It's a rocking back and forth in the corner of a padded room beat, that compels me to move and flip this over again.
I love that there are bands like Yvette further strip mining these future primitive sounds, I could use more of it. So glad they sent this, looking forward to seeing them at DBA Dec 8th.
The guitar is mostly deconstructed, hardly even a strummed string anymore, just the base wave of a vibrating string sound, a program to approximate the second hand description of a note. They've got a lot fo Black Dice up their sleeves, really unique unsettling sounds and rhythms. The shoegaze etherial vocal is maybe closer to The Soft Moon, so distant and layered it starts to not even sound like a vocal....or at least like it most definitely doesn't belong in this bladerunner back alley, it's too 'nice' soundign compared to everything else.
The B-Side, "With Fangs" has big synth teeth and ever pounding drums. Hugely hyptnotic and dark, I can't get past HEALTH's self titled record on Lovepump United and how you had no idea where that album was going, it was surprising at every turn and Yvette is able to pull off that same freedom, in four tracks they've managed to carve a huge swath out of noise that goes everywhere from the Swans to The Big Sleep. All the while kind of working in an angelic way, the vocals are equally buried and unrecognizable but essentially the harmony is deliberately opposite rhythmically and instrumentally from the obviously human parts.
On "Less" they have this synthetic sound so completely nailed, the drums recorded perfectly huge, I'm convinced they have carved out their own variation of ghost punk...like this swirling distortion effect on crash cymbals? It's a rocking back and forth in the corner of a padded room beat, that compels me to move and flip this over again.
I love that there are bands like Yvette further strip mining these future primitive sounds, I could use more of it. So glad they sent this, looking forward to seeing them at DBA Dec 8th.
Check out their bandcamp page here and buy the single here.
just picked this up tonight used for a couple of bucks based off of the mini capsule review written on the record's plastic sleeve - definitely has that Drums era Liars feel. Very much like an updated Cabaret Voltaire. Great stuff.
ReplyDeleteNice...yea this was a find, glad they sent this in.
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