Review & Track Premiere: Yawn, Materialism
Yawn, ‘Lachrymator II’ premiere
Norwegian instrumentalist genre-melters Yawn make their full-length debut this Friday, Feb. 18, with Materialism on Mindsweeper Records. The album runs 37 minutes — given the subject matter, one assumes it could’ve been longer — and brims with purpose in a blend of elements from djenting post-metal and spazzjazz finger-tap guitar to industrialist pounding to wide open psychedelic spaciousness and back again. Comprised of 16 tracks that make up four individual songs, each broken down into smaller subheadings — opener “Cement III” has three, “Chaos I” has five, “Lachrymator II” (premiering above) has four and “Tokamak IV” has four — that make up the entirety of the thing, the album begins with a piece called “Cement III – Gobsmack,” and the Oslo-based five-piece aren’t kidding. What ensues is an oddly-timed pounding that’s incessant even as it fades out and in the span of the record’s first two and a half minutes what was such an utterly dominant sound is swallowed by a soothing wash of melodic drone, peppered with far-back keys and volume swell at the beginning of “Cement III – Fallout.” Figuratively and literally, it goes on from there.
Of course, “Cement III – Restart, Reload, Rebuild” renews the onslaught, but it’s changed, and in the course of fewer than five minutes, Yawn — guitarists Mike McCormick (also electronics) and Torfinn Lysne, bassist Simen Wie, synthesist Tarjei Kjerland Lienig and drummer Oskar Johnsen Rydh (who also mixed) — have set a breadth of scope and given the first clues as to their likewise broad ambitions. Materialism is a work intended difference, a concept in sound that is meant to break specific rules about where styles or subgenres begin and end. This happens likewise in the noise collage of “Chaos I – Artificial Superstition” and in the intense electronic churn that ensues before opening wide to a massive, synth-laced Matrix-meets-Meshuggah ultra-hell.
And as if to prove the point, Wie‘s bass takes over before the 1:51 of that part is over and leads the way into “Chaos I – ISM” and is the ground upon which an improv-sounding melee takes place, avant drums and electronics topping that initial line, which may or may not be looped by then, and coming to a head that would be the titular chaos were Yawn not in complete control the entire time before arriving at a transitional chugga-chugga and noise push, static and harsh frequencies sweeping upward until “Chaos I – Unintelligence” puts that chug in the forward spot. They’re still djenting, and the cinematic aspect of the synth holds even as they begin to frenetically gallop in the second half of the 90-second piece, coming to a dead stop before “Chaos I – Order” arrives in perhaps tongue-in-cheek fashion with a return to the collage of the song’s first part. Oh, so we’re back to the brutalist assault on the brain’s processing power? Order has been established.
At just over 10 minutes total, the four parts of “Lachrymator II” run a similarly constructed gambit, moving from an quickly initialized thunderous rollout on “Lachrymator II – Lignite” — a purposeful slog — that fades into the distance before a synthesizer takeover like a ringing phone or alarm in your memory becomes an experimentalist electronica soundscape, a kind of buzzing peppered with echoing bell-keyboard sounds, minimalist but dramatic for that on “Lachrymator II – Erebus & Terror,” which it should be noted is still only about two and a half minutes long before it sweeps into the solo-topped outset of “Lachrymator II – Tripwire,” the synth becoming dreamy behind. If there’s a story here, the bass is foreboding, but for a moment it’s a glorious prog rock future.
Doesn’t last, but these things never do, and part of the strength of Materialism is how well Yawn make the jump from one part to the next. Not necessarily where the tracks divide on the digital version — recall the bass in “Chaos I” arrived before that next part actually began — but the manner in which transitions are fluid or abrupt when the band wants them to be and so confidently executed is a significant accomplishment for a first full-length. They’re able to do it in no small part because they’ve decided to be brave enough to do it. Easy on paper, harder in reality, rarely so immediately refined feeling on a first LP that still, it should be noted, doesn’t at all overstay its welcome at under 40 minutes long and seems as much like a statement of mission as an expression of craft.
“Lachrymator II – Tripwire” shifts into the sudden chase rhythm of “Lachrymator II – Unstoppable Force,” which kind of sounds like the beat is a mouse that the snare sound is trying to trap. Synth backs this at first, and guitars join in as the piece develops, driving forward until the push opens to a series of tectonic stomps, the rumbling beneath feeling like it should last even longer than it does feeding directly into “Tokamak IV – Immovable Object” — note the two meeting. The final movement of Materialism is no less forward thinking than anything prior, but the manner in which its arrangement fleshes out to include different percussive sounds and pointedly psychedelic guitar offers a take different from the preceding three/12 tracks.
The immovable object gives way to “Tokamak IV – Critical Mass,” which gradually melds the already noted acid guitar with an industrial beat in a way that, golly, I wish that happened more often in life, and develops back into a mathy series of starts and stops in “Tokamak IV – Fluorescence & Entropy,” the longest individual part at 3:48 and what seems to be the album’s payoff until it recedes into noise and back to the drone, leaving “Tokamak IV – Confluence” to cap the album with a worthy display of outright tectonic punishment.
At just two minutes long, the last piece of “Tokamak IV” does precisely that. Yawn bring the chug back around, and a howl that feels born out of the prior lysergic excursion takes hold for a while, but ultimately it is the slamming weight and feedback that consume the piece, and it should be noted that there’s 10-plus seconds of silence that closes out the record, as though they wanted the listener to be ready for a last-second surge. That Materialism is self-produced — McCormick, Lysne and Rydh are credited as recording, while Tom “Iggy” Ignatus mastered — only underscores the self-determination on the part of Yawn, who’ve apparently spent the last several years putting these pieces together. Their time has not been misspent. Materialism is ambitious as noted, but refuses to leave any of its ambitions unmet, and the surety of what Yawn bring to bear throughout is luminescent, sometimes to a strobing degree. May they continue the exploration of their own wavelength that they’re beginning here.
Yawn, Materialism (2022)
Mindsweeper Records on Facebook
Tags: Materialism, Mindsweeper Records, Norway, Oslo, Yawn, Yawn Materialism
