A scream turns to heavy respiration, these breaths give solution to bass and drums, and logic dissolves into superb chaos on the opening observe of Yves Tumor’s new album, Reward a Lord Who Chews However Which Does Not Devour; (Or Merely, Sizzling Between Worlds).
That prolonged title gives a style of Tumor’s humorousness, in addition to a touch at their ambitions, which, like Matryoshka dolls, come nested one inside the opposite. Take the primary music, “God Is a Circle,” which begins with the lyrics, “Typically, it looks like there’s locations in my thoughts that I can’t go.” The sentiment appears to have a number of meanings: a thesis assertion and private problem, a meditation on limits and a willpower to interrupt via them.
Alongside the best way, Tumor sings of feeling “like a ghost inside a effectively,” ponders find out how to course of studying that “everybody you like loves another person,” and repeats the phrase, “Standard dance.” What you received’t hear in “God Is a Circle” is the phrase, “Circle,” although you’ll find God in Momma’s phrases and maybe, should you hear intently, within the house between breaths.
“Every thing round us feels unclean,” Tumor muses, “My Momma mentioned, ‘God sees all the pieces.’” Other than this glimpse of an untidy deity, we’re left to wrestle ourselves with how “God Is a Circle,” whilst Tumor wrestles with relationships and ache. Maybe that closed loop comes within the irresistible name and response of, “Standard dance,” which caps off the music and collapses a observe’s value of exploration and harm right into a clear, vicious cycle.
Tumor’s fourth album, produced by Noah Goldstein with Alan Moulder’s combine, maintains the adventurous spirit that energized their 2016 debut, When Man Fails You. However the sonic touchstones are actually galaxies away. After that experimental introduction, Tumor launched the pop-inflected Secure within the Palms of Love in 2017, and for 2020’s masterful Heaven to a Tortured Thoughts, they layered on full-throated psychedelic rock. 2021’s The Asymptotic World EP leaned additional into these sounds, and now comes Reward a Lord Who Chews However Which Does Not Devour with a distinct sort of first — the primary consolidation of a sound. As a substitute of a complete new route, it takes the extra rocking moments of Heaven and Asymptotic World and mines them for recent complexity, like a leaf below a microscope revealing boggling techniques of fractals. 4 albums in they’ve tried nearly all the pieces as soon as, and on their newest album, they relish the issues they do higher than anybody else.
That features a near-endless capability for magnificence and the perverse need to interrupt it. “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood” opens with ripping guitar riff, which is sort of immediately reduce off by a younger boy saying, “Properly should you die, it’s okay, you possibly can simply restart.” In context it’s humorous and deeply unsettling, a reminder of each loss of life and all of the pursuits (like video video games) that we use to distract ourselves from that inevitability.
