The Cloud of Unknowing…
This week’s instalment of New Music is a double-feature, because I just couldn’t make the hard choice. Up first is a trippy excursion into the realms of experimental post-punk, guided by one of music’s most interesting and unique voices. Then, prepare to be emotionally devastated by the spare introspection of a surprising full-length debut.
Praise a Lord Who Chews…
Yves Tumor
Neo-Psychedelia / Post-Punk
Admittedly, the entry point for Sean Bowie’s music is extreme. His experimentalism is often beyond abstract, and the sounds they use to express that abstraction run the gamut from mysterious and ethereal to ear-splitting and grating. But that dichotomy has given Bowie and incredibly dense and expansive playground in which to form Yves Tumor’s musical palate.
Strange then, that this album, Bowie’s fifth as Yves Tumor, with its overwhelmingly long title (the full text of which is Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)), is by a wide margin their most accessible. While the opening track, “God Is a Circle,” may seem like an addition to the weird world of Yves, with its beat constructed from samples of horror movie victims’ panicked breaths, what follows is an immersive trip through time to the garage rock and post-punk of 2000’s Interpol and Arctic Monkeys.
Bowie, despite their penchant for the undeniably odd, has always found their most inspired sounds when they’re torn between the worlds of rose-tinted nostalgia and the Hieronymus Bosch hellscape of disassociation. “Meteora Blues,” is reminiscent of an Oasis deep cut, with it's unfiltered, major chord guitars, while “Operator” replicates the moody, subterranean feel of Bauhaus.
Praise a Lord Who Chews… marks a massive checkpoint for Bowie’s musical maturation. While previous albums like 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind and 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love proved Yves Tumor had the songwriting chops, their use of such a seemingly random Supermarket Sweep of genre influences made them nearly unapproachable. Here, by setting constraints to curtail their most lavish excesses, Yves Tumor produces a truly exceptional album that seems like it’s just the beginning.
Yian
Lucinda Chua
Ambient Pop
This was going to be a review of the new Caroline Rose album, which by the way, I LOOOVE! However, SPOILER ALERT, they’re going to be the subject of next week’s Five-Year Rewind, so in the interest of variety, we have an stunningly gorgeous debut full-length album by Lucinda Chua, Yian.
On her first album, Lucinda Chua presents what I can best describe as a glorious amalgam of soft-pop influences: Bjork, James Blake, Sufjan Stevens, and Bat for Lashes are all in the mix here; and she combines them with her classical training as a cellist into a hazy exploration of her childhood in the Chinese immigrant community.
Album standout “An Ocean” finds Chua unlearning and unbecoming, with her delicate, melancholic voice shifting and dancing between tender strings and muted piano. Here she finds freedom in the distance she has drifted away from love, carried by a sea of loss, static, and violins.
The album closes with “Something Other Than Years,” where Chua sings in duet with Yeule, another child of the Chinese diaspora. It is an ephemeral, almost liminal experience to hear two voices merge into one, soaring above a slowly building piano and string section. “Show me how to live this life,” Chua coos, with the unvoiced weight of a billion lost children. She is become yian, 燕, the swallow, lifted by her wings on the warm summer air, only to disappear over the horizon.
