The band doesn’t even try to make these songs sum up to anything coherent: each song hits, fades, and the next introduces itself, just to fade again in record time. On each, synthesist Jack Tobias puts down ominous chords and motifs at the worst moments; guitarist-that-sounds-like-a-synthesist Saguiv Rosenstock plays what could very well be the transposed sheet music of a dying dog’s final whimpers; vocalist Zack Borzone moans against the beat in broken Revelations-inspired word association poetry; and drummer Sam Pickard works like the devil to hold the whole operation together. Right when you get accustomed to one song’s palate, it pauses, waits a few seconds, and smacks you across the face with another – ten tracks across eleven minutes.
YHWH Nailgun, the quartet behind this monstrosity, have
been roughly this confrontational for a hot second, but it’s never been
this bad. Here, they ditch the rototoms and vocal reverb that marked
their previous sound, abandoning nearly every semblance of tunefulness
and lurching further towards pummelling, nearly directionless,
apocalyptic noise – as the final track fades out and the first track
fades in again, you feel like you could be stuck here forever. Debut
album 45 Pounds took the occasional moment to craft something
that could resemble a hook, or a melody, or a short flash of beauty,
before diving back into scheduled programming. Magazine will have absolutely none of it.
Perhaps there’s a world where this album could have run
longer than “Starless”, but it could have never assaulted the listener
like this does. The longest track here, the opener, is barely a minute
and a half; the shortest, the title track, blasts as Borzone makes gun
noises and cries “bleed lamb, bleed lamb, bleed” before it cuts off
abruptly after just thirty seconds and change. It hits viscerally enough
to put the most aggressive grindcore album to shame, and yet for an
album so resonant it barely sounds human – something more like the
broken radio transmissions of an alien planet that just started reading
the Bible, the mathematically generated music of a computer trapped in
cyberspace against its will, the sounds assembled by four possessed
middle schoolers who didn’t learn how to play their instruments. The
result, somehow, is brilliant: uncontrolled chaos, presented in the most
controlled of settings.
