Yellow Swans - At All Ends (Load)
3/5
By: Charlie Potter
It is rare for musicians to start with the aesthetic or effect that they want and then work backwards, though there is obviously the exception of advertising or film scores. But in terms of records made to listen to on their own, there isn't really much in the way of music that is made to fulfil such a criteria.
It seems very unlikely to me that Yellow Swans got up one day and said to themselves, 'hmm, how can we get people to feel like their lungs are full of a kind of relaxing, alleviating, soothing amber glowing liquid, making them feel at one with the world and relaxed with their surroundings?' and then thought 'I know, we'll get some guitars and delay units and mic's and oscillators and play them really loud until it sounds like a massive high pitch dirge!".
Although this is what they have done, and it has amounted to the aforementioned effect, I think that it's much more likely that they played around on their guitars and their gizmos because that is what they enjoy doing until they reached a point where they thought 'yeah, that sounds great'. And it does.
At All Ends is not as simple as just one big dirge though of course, that would assume that Yellow Swans were the first people to make a great big noisy racket and realise that it sounds great, and this is of course not the case. Admittedly, this is where my part of the bargain gets a little more difficult. What is it that is so special about Yellow Swans' particular style of noise? After all, there's an awful lot of noise out there, but look at it this way - there is far more rigorously structured music out there, so should we listen to both in about equal amounts, or should 'noise' be treated as bridging the gap between the music we intentionally listen to and the disorganised sounds we hear around us?
What I think makes music like that of Yellow Swans so much more difficult to talk about is that it doesn't refer to things as formally as more conventional music does. Perhaps it does refer to other noise, perhaps it's just other noise that I don't know about, but I think that the approach of the musicians is more led by the physical sounds than referring to other music, which leaves me explaining to you the sounds as poetically as I can. Well, either that or you just get me going on about the equipment they are using. Well, let me tell you, I don't really know what equipment they are using.
So here is the poetry that you have all been waiting for.
At All Ends is a high pitched, silty, sifting, decaying essence of all that has but collapsed, slowly breathing and pulsing into one amorphous form, with a ghostly high pitched echoes scraping the top of your head as it enters your ears and leaves out the back door of your mind, leaving mind burns of burnt mind, whilst your legs are full of water and eggs rendering you paralysed, captivated... but wait! What is that I hear, a guitar in the distance, or some tree dwelling animal with a thinly coiled copper wire throat and nickel wound steel for vocal chords?
Or you could just call it euphoric drone, with a very crusty sound, tentatively organised into swelling build ups, a bloody good record of its kind, but perhaps lacking in the structural imagination necessary to warrant giving it anything more than the following amount of stars.
Download a legal MP3 of 'Our Oases' from 'At All Ends' HERE.
Artists in this article: Yellow Swans
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment