Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies are designed to prompt artists in such a way that they can break away from habits, overcome blocks, and move into fresh creative spaces. While these strategies lean philosophic (“Emphasize the flaws”, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”), they can also be practically applied (“No guitars”, “Use only major chords”).
One imagines that YHWH Nailgun, with their new and 11-minute album Magazine, might’ve taken a few nudges from Eno: “Each song should clock in at less than one minute and thirty seconds”. “Driving energetics: id, guerilla politics, DIY”.
YWHY Nailgun’s debut LP, 45 Pounds, was no saga itself, wrapping up in 21 minutes. Still, the tracks on that set were sculpted, composed, arranged. Motifs were introduced, developed, and, in turn, resolved or overtly sabotaged. If 45 Pounds centered on balances between unity and disunity, between order and the anarchic impulse, Magazine is more spontaneous-sounding, landing as a series of mostly unrelated, though consistently intriguing, sonic Rorschachs.
It feels curmudgeonly and a bit unmodish to find fault with Magazine’s truncations and incompletions. After all, who doesn’t want to pull for a project like this? – especially now, when a hyper-conservative swell is running everything from Aristotle’s notion of unity to the broader “12 elements of culture” through an Orwellian filter, striving to reinstate whiteness, heterosexuality, and Christianity as social and moral bars.
With Magazine, YHWH Nailgun unequivocally and emphatically reject Western civilization’s vehicles of containment. Unity, cohesion, centripetality, continuity – limiting and cliché. To hell with so-called rock music, too. It and God died decades ago; let’s incinerate both and be done with the masquerades. We want revolution, emancipation, eclecticism, dada, surrealism, pantheism, the cut-up method, Fluxus, chaos, readymade-ism, memeism, fluidity, art for art’s sake. But, in the process, does Magazine throw the proverbial wine out with the twist-off?
“Ghost of Love” launches the sequence with an amalgam of squeaky synths and Sam Pickard’s alternately metallic and hollow-sounding drums. The piece converges like an electrical storm, an ambush, a violent fugue; a minute-plus later, vanishing into funereal silence. “Stillness Blues”, with its initial busyness, hints at video-game hyperpop, then devolves into a sludgy sprawl, conjuring a blend between Chat Pile, Model/Actriz, and side 2 of In Utero.
A listener is implicitly invited to encounter their biases. Development, please. Pacing. Interconnectedness between tracks. And yet, as a friend often says, “whatever trip they’re offering, that’s the one I’m taking”. “Hips on a Wheel” is brittle, harsh, smoky, with bouncy accents that recall Portrayal of Guilt’s eclectic bent, particularly on this year’s …Beginning of the End. As with “Ghost of Love”, the piece emerges and erupts, spewing ash across the landscape, dissolving in the protean magma a minute later.
“Ballerina” moves between staccato riffs and restrained/adrenalized drumming. Zack Borzone’s voice sounds as if the singer woke with a blackshine hangover before gargling with battery acid and taking a few bong hits. The 35-second title song blends pinball effects, percussive sorties, and vocals that occur as panicked reportage from a war zone. With “Sewer Tree”, meanwhile, the band slow down slightly, the opening rhythms obliquely reminiscent of Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”. The piece then segues into a more anxiety-soaked segment, evoking the experience of navigating a gauntlet while strangers wave knives in your face (inevitably drawing blood).
Magazine inhabits a stylish intersection: the afterglow of math rock meets a punk/DIY aesthetic meets the spirit of free jazz. These tracks, while ultimately occurring as demo-y or still-fetal, are nevertheless riveting, in the way that a public meltdown or a dead body on a sidewalk is riveting. Despite its problems, Magazine serves as a rallying call, a war cry to rouse the dumbed-down spirit.
