Yves Tumor ‘Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume’ Review – Ambitious and Existential Art-Rock

March 20, 2023

Yves Tumor’s ‘Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)‘ is Music Feeds’ Album of the Week. Joseph Earp reviews.

If you accept that life is chaos – that shit, unfortunately, happens all the time – then it’s hard to know what to do next. Your best intentions will fall apart. Your perfect plans will wither. You’ll either set up a sense-making system that will buckle under the weight of sheer randomness, or you’ll just get buffeted around, chaotically, till you die.

The latter option makes you feel powerless. The former option enrols you in a life of constant disappointment and readjustment, watching things fall apart, and then building them up again, knowing that they won’t last long either.

Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)

Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds), the new album by Yves Tumor, takes the former route. As its weighty, profound title implies – gotta love that “simply” following the least simple album title ever, right? – the record alternates between grandiosity and pathetic, crushing disappointment.

Sonically, the album is constantly falling in and out of time with itself. Moments of clarity, as in the excellent ‘Meteora Blues’, have a sort of happenstance to them. It’s the cleanest song on the record, the most direct, but even it has moments when it all sort of falls away, into grinding noise and confusion.

‘God is A Circle’, the album’s opening track – and its standout – only periodically snaps into focus. There’s a grinding beat to hold it in place, but everything that happens on top is messy, filled with screams and portentous lyrics.

The result is a record that you can dance to in bursts; that will meet you where you live, occasionally, and then step away, leaving you to wallow. Its closest approximations are the least strange songs of both Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten. Like those bands, Yves Tumor find beauty and pain in the mechanical, and like those bands, there’s a rhythmic quality that echoes both the repetitive din of a factory and the pump-pump-pump of a regrettable fuck.

Praise A Lord Who Chews… is good, and good in a way that requires attention. Left in the background, it’ll sound bizarre and distracting. Given a proper listen, it’ll sound like a musician sifting through entrails or decoding a Rorschach.