This past weekend, YouTube hosted its first-ever music awards show as a self-congratulatory nod to the role it's played this past decade in facilitating the breakthroughs of our most famous pop stars and novelty-hit atrocities alike. But for music fans who came of age in the pre-internet era, the site has served a more practical, psychologically mollifying function: It’s helped verify the occurrence of events that, for decades, we thought we had simply hallucinated.
For instance, thanks to YouTube, one can confirm that: a) Joan Rivers did indeed have a late-night talk show in the 80s; b) Suzanne Somers was its occasional fill-in host; and c) one night in 1987, U.K. post-punk godheads Wire were her musical guests. They didn’t even perform their accessible dance-rock crossover single of the time, “Ahead”, but the impenetrable, pummelling The Ideal Copy bonus track “Drill.” And instead of just offering up a simple post-performance wave and handshake, Somers actually tried to engage the notoriously stoic group in egreiously idle chit-chat as if she were still hanging at the Regal Beagle. The clip stands as a time capsule of alternative rock’s painfully awkward early encounters with the mainstream, and even today, when indie bands can seemingly go from Bandcamp to Letterman in a mouse-click, it’s hard to imagine such a deviously dissonant anti-pop gesture being allowed to play out anywhere near a network-television soundstage. But if there is to ever be another underground-spawned art-punk band to find itself enduring awkward small talk with a television host, my money is on Brooklyn’s Yvette.
Yvette are a two-piece band, but sound like an army—both in their blitzkrieged aggression and the militaristically disciplined manner in which they deploy it. They’re an industrial act in the truest sense of the term, transforming scabrous raw materials into beautiful, glistening, chrome-plated objects that cast an uncanny allure. Theirs is a noise molded into the contours—if not the sound—of pop music, offering an accessible entry point into a world of ugly brutalism. But if Yvette approach their music with assembly-line precison and expediency, their output is hardly identi-kit. Process, their full-length debut, may list 11 tracks on its artwork, however, those markers seem almost arbitrary; rather, the album feels like a series of fragmented outbursts compacted together into a 33-minute piece that frequently shifts course and reanimates into new shapes without warning, often within a span of a single song.
Produced by Godmode Records co-founder/Pitchfork contributor Nick Sylvester, Process proffers a spectacular collision of live, in-the-room clarity (Rick Daniel’s foreboding cymbal taps practically leave cut marks on your skin) and grotesquely manipulated sonics: synths squiggle like screeching guitars; guitars get blown out into bass frequencines; bass lines hum and drone like synths. With harshly rendered sonics and ticking-time-bomb beats swirling around the 360-degree mix, the songs immediately establish a claustrophobic sense of impending doom: The siren-like pulses of “Cuts Me in Half” sound like a contaminated science-lab counting down to self-destruct mode; the otherwise straight-forward post-punk charge of “Attrition” is rendered as a warped, fun-house-mirrored death trip. And Yvette are students not just of Wire’s coldly futurist sound and disaffected lyricism, but their sense of pacing, too—even in songs that rarely crack the three-minute mark, there are extended rhythmic builds that suddenly yield to acclereated, white-knuckled climaxes.
But perhaps the most unnerving sound of all on Process is found in Noah Kardos-Fein’s atypically smooth (for a spastic-noise-punk-band) voice, which mostly retains an eerie sense of calm amid the tribal-percussive thumps and mutating discord that threatens to consume him; in the midst of the Liars-like onslaught of “Carbon Copy”, his double-tracked harmonies have the power to freeze the song into a dead stop, only to shatter its structure and liquefy into something new. And given that Kardos-Fein’s mantras-as-manifestos adhere to a melodic logic (if not consistent verse-chorus-verse structures), Process carries with it the possibility of Yvette evolving into something even more ambitious and imposing. The last two pieces, in particular, offer compelling evidence of what this band is capable of when they temper their shifty impluses and see an idea through to its logical conclusion: the instrumental “Absolutes” is the album’s longest song and, not coincidentally its most fully realized, a gonzo air-raid attack of a track that violently unleashes all the pent-up tension the album’s accrued to that point; it clears the way for the ice-age aftermath of “Radiation”, a thundering drums and drones jam that—even the absence of a proper chorus—exudes a cavernous, concert-hall grandeur. At this point, a Leno appearance for Yvette may seem highly unlikely, but don’t count out Fallon.
