The third album from Olympia punk trio Naomi Punk, Yellow, opens with a sequence of three instrumental tracks that wander and then stop cold, like dropped thoughts. With them, Yellow wastes no time weeding out listeners hoping for another quick fix of grungy rock. In every other regard, though, Yellow wastes quite a bit of time. Years in the making, it is a 75-minute, 25-track study in repetition that doesn’t readily let the listener in on whatever conclusions it draws.
Naomi Punk had hinted they might have a record like this in them. The 2014 Television Man LP periodically broke from the shiv-like rock of their debut for lengthy, arty explorations. But where Television Man was still a rock album at its core, Yellow’s driving impulse is experimentation. In the spirit of Wire, they’ve grown more interested in deconstructing their songs than writing them. And, as if in homage to that group, guitarist Travis Coster’s voice takes on shades of both Colin Newman’s punk sneer and Graham Lewis’ dehumanized croon. One of Naomi Punk’s cooler tricks is nailing the way that Lewis’ more robotic lead turns always sounded like they were being played back from a computer running out of RAM.
There are a couple of spirited 1980s nods along the way. With its synthesized bass, one of the only hints of bass on the whole album, “My Shadow” nails the whole Karate Kid-era video arcade aesthetic, while for two minutes “Matroska” conjures the barren, synthesized rumble of the Cure’s Faith. But those sonic switch-ups are few and far between. Most of the album’s main event songs, the ones that aren’t scrapped together from found sounds or studio racket, follow the same general template of crooked guitar chords, strummed so repeatedly that your own hand can’t help but vicariously cramp up, while drums thud and indeterminate noises creak and bubble around them.
It’s a template as rigid as Andy Warhol’s soup can screenprints, and like those works, Yellow’s songs keep coming long after the point has been made. Instead of paying off with new twists or revelations, the album only grows more cemented in its ways as it enters its increasingly redundant final stretch. The 11-minute gauntlet of “Yellow Cone Hat,” “Carniceria,” and “Motorcade” plays out as three very minor variations of the same mechanical riff, none of them any more eventful or memorable than the others. All that repetition makes for an album that’s as monochromatic as its title.
The central challenge of art punk is how to experiment without completely sacrificing the thrill of a sound that’s typically been synonymous with speed and brevity. Naomi Punk aren’t interested in solving that problem, though. Their concerns are largely conceptual. Between its purposefully narrow sonic template, recirculated motifs, and disjointed lyrics about art and actualization, Yellow presents itself as an intricate puzzle box, one that probably reveals even more facets on vinyl, where its songs are spread out across four sides, creating new patterns to ponder. Naomi Punk have clearly put a lot of thought into constructing it. Now if only it were more interesting to engage with.
