Yellow Swans : Bring the Neon War Home

This is nightmare music — the soundtrack that plays as microsecond clips of war, famine and disaster flash through your subconscious. Troops marching to their impending deaths and the decimation of innocents; the passageway leading them there is your ear canal, where the corpses are mourned by this incessant ringing you try, but can’t ignore. And sometimes nightmares can be oddly pleasant.

Bring the Neon War Home is the first proper full-length from this Bay Area two-piece after a handful of self-released seven-inches and CD-Rs. Five tracks clocking in at just under forty minutes, all of them exploratory voyages into the depths of semi-constructed noise. Who knows what gear these guys use, but at points you can distinguish screeching guitars, blast beats, garbled distorted vocals (used sparingly) and heavy synth filter work. I would guess there’s also a handful of homemade electronics thrown in for good measure.

To look at any of this album’s tracks as individual songs would really do a disservice to the utter psychosis of the album in it’s entirety. Bring the
Neon War Home plays as continuation of the emotions that fueled the writing and recording of the record. Though individually most of the songs would seem out of place and nonsensical, together they form a cohesive statement against chord progressions, scales, harmonies, hooks, choruses and anything that pop music relies on. That being said, the song “Neon War” uses this approach, loaded with dirty blast beats to create specks of noise-laden melody that, for a brief moment, will actually get your head nodding.

Yellow Swans haven’t reinvented the wheel with their first full length, they’ve just carved it into a square, showing the ride doesn’t always have to be smooth to get to your desired destination. In this case it’s somewhere between an epileptic fit and a last ditch insanity plea.

Similar Albums:
Merzbow – Merzbird
Black Dice – Cold Hands
Wolf Eyes – Wolf Eyes