yves tumor.
Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
© Warp, 2023
A scintillating, explosive blend of neo-psychedelia, glam rock, and electro-R&B, Yves Tumor’s fifth album is one of their strongest statements yet. A tight collection of hooky ragers, Praise a Lord cements mastermind Sean Bowie as the vanguard of modern rock.
Sean Bowie built a chair.
The past few years have enabled us all to dive deeper into our hobbies, old and new. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we all slid cautiously into a new daily routine, spending hours and hours at home with nothing but free time. Teachers, office workers, and even rock stars set to dominate the world were forced to reinvigorate themselves with ways to fight boredom from the comfort of their homes. Sean Bowie, known professionally as Yves Tumor, was one such person, and with the delay of live touring, Bowie delved into interior architecture and furniture-making. When melting the faces of audiences worldwide wasn’t a realistic option, they opted to melt bed frames instead.
Even with that massive pandemic-sized roadblock in their way, Yves Tumor and its band entered 2020 as the up-and-coming act to watch, and came out the other side of the pandemic opening for Nine Inch Nails, collaborating with Willow, and with the promise of new music on the way. Heaven to a Tortured Mind was their fourth full length album, and 2021 brought us The Asymptotical World EP, two bodies of work that seamlessly blend kaleidoscopic glam, sensual R&B ambience, and a 90’s alt-rock thrash that blow the doors of genre wide open with possibilities.
It seems as if the gears never stopped turning for Yves Tumor, who first teased word of their fifth full length LP almost 2 years ago. As they progressively rose in prominence with the onset of live touring, eager fans waited with bated breath for the latest word from their angel-turned-devil rocker, culminating in their brand new album this past week. Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) picks up where The Asymptotical World left off, with the notion that everything is dialed up to 11. Choruses are stickier, guitar breakdowns are heavier, and Yves’ vocals permeate all 12 tracks like melting butter on a searing skillet. This is pulverizing, hip-thrusting, sweaty, glamorous, all-caps ROCK. These songs ooze a timeless swagger, frankensteining 70’s space rock with 90’s grunge and hybridizing them into something familiar and alien all at once. With a surname like Bowie, are we really surprised that Yves Tumor is here to save glam rock in their own twisted image? You may call it irony, but I see it as destiny.
The whole album kicks off with a blood-curdling scream, followed by an endless loop of heavy gasping; “God is a Circle” adds a robotic drum pattern, guitar freakouts, and Sean’s voice at the center of the chaos, a nonchalant narrator beckoning the listener to enter their house of horrors. Yves Tumor has always played with horror iconography, and here, they inhibit the genre’s aesthetics with ease. They are both Frankenstein and his monster, the ingenious tinkerer and the abominable amalgamation.
Lo-fi aesthetics fill the sludgy “Lovely Sewer” with a deep grime, burying murky drum pads and lurching basslines under crystal clear vocals courtesy Yves and Kida, breaching the depths with an angelic lushness. The 2000’s garage rock revival is channeled expertly on late album track “In Spite of War” with its revved guitars and loose drumming. The rapid fire drum fills and breathy vocals of “Fear Evil Like Fire” conjure post-rock moodiness. And needless to say, these songs all have gold star hooks. Sean Bowie has grown as a lyricist and vocalist over the years, contorting their voice from a creaky hiss to an angelic falsetto at a moment’s notice, and with expertly crafted choruses, these songs all find a way to become quick and easily accessible earworms.
Sean even lets their hypnagogic roots run rampant on penultimate cut “Purified By the Fire;” rapidly looped horns, industrial-style buzzsaw synths, ferocious tribal drums and plucky lead melodies carry this brief instrumental detour into the closer “Ebony Eye,” an eye-watering and grandiose final bow for the album, soundtracking a volcanic eruption as lightning fills the skies with Yves Tumor and its band welcoming the apocalypse, jamming away atop gargantuan stone pillars.
Singles “Echolalia” and “Heaven Surrounds Us Like A Hood” further demonstrate Sean’s brilliance as a hitmaker, bringing a bratty edge to the glammy Krautrock of the first cut, and a deep well of psychedelic bliss to the latter; the explosion and meter change in the second half of “Heaven” is godlike.
All these incredible deep cuts aside, it’s the triptych of “Meteora Blues,” “Interlude,” and “Parody” that serves, in my mind, as the record’s centerpiece. A 90’s lovechild of grungy grit and shoegazing walls of noise, “Meteora Blues” envelops the listener in thick, unbreakable layers of reverb and distortion, before the whole thing caves in on itself during “Interlude.” A brief, 50-second hymn of vocalizing and piano, it serves as a perfect cooldown from the red hot romance of “Meteora” into the sobering morning after of “Parody.” In a way, “Parody” is the perfect synopsis of Sean Bowie’s deconstruction of glam rock, but also an introspective look in the mirror:
“What makes you feel so important? / Can you spell it out for us?
Send your face and name on a postcard / A parody of a pop star /
You behaved like a monster / Is it all just makeup?”
Where does the line that separates caricature from human begin and end? Like many a glam rock icon of the past, the answer is unclear. If Sean continues down this road, endlessly seeking to expand and subvert the rockstar persona, how much will be Sean Bowie and how much will be Yves Tumor? It may be too soon to tell, but odds are, the finding out will undoubtedly be a spectacle.
Praise a Lord, while arguably Yves Tumor’s most accessible record yet, is without question a true testament to their enduring creative genius. A fiery collection of glam pastiche, searing rock maximalism, and decadent R&B stylings, this fifth full length from one of contemporary rock’s brightest stars is every bit as intoxicating as their previous efforts, if not more so. Never one to sit anywhere for too long, we can only hope that the next outing from this astonishing artist is something just as mind-boggling, and equally as tantalizing. Another easily asserted masterpiece.
Sean Bowie built a chair. Yves Tumor made it a throne.
- Aaron
