We don’t need to get into the particulars of what defines an LP versus an EP. If Sufjan Stevens can share a sixty-minute project and call it an EP, then let’s all be cool about YHWH Nailgun’s Magazine being called the former despite running just eleven minutes. A year ago, I called the New York band’s debut, 45 Pounds, a “grotesque, eccentric reverie of feels-bad-man doom music.” This time around, the songs aren’t nearly as calamitous or fanged, but they’re still a counteragent to the indie-rock formula.
I’ve known about the premise of Magazine since late last year, because its length has been something of an open secret among industry people. The whole time, though, I thought, “Surely that concept won’t work, will it?” It does work, and sometimes just as well as 45 Pounds did with double the runtime: ten quick, pummeling sonic assaults, just with less rototom and shorter finish lines. Someone online said Magazine reminds them of “growing up poor and only listening to the iTunes album snippets.” There’s your thesis statement.
Magazine unfurls in a fascinating way. Each track is like a fragment, some cutting off abruptly without a fade. But YHWH Nailgun walk a taut line. There’s catastrophe in the music, but the real collapse is in Zack Borzone’s poetry, which is blood-red as fresh viscera, especially in “Hips on a Wheel”: “I’m a hangman, mama, but I love to breathe / All my life I’ve been blinded in the knee.” His vocals are also more compelling than ever: he still sounds like a preacher drinking in an apocalypse, but the reverb that mutated his voice throughout 45 Pounds is mostly gone, revealing a tortured but talented narrator. All of his syllables have scoliosis, and there’s not a single hook or hummable melody on Magazine for them to hide behind. I can’t tell which parts are Saguiv Rosenstock’s guitar and which are Jack Tobias’ sequencers. The resulting overlap is a contradiction: elating but revolting.
There’s no fat on this record. On the thirty-five-second title track, Borzone gargles a gun sound while Tobias’ synthesizers dart and ping like a sci-fi horror climax. The opener, “Ghost of Love,” is ninety-six seconds of a clanging racket that I can only describe as the Titanic submersible’s carbon-fiber hull expanding ten thousand feet underwater. Tobias’ keys later exhale gently in “Innocent Sigh,” and Sam Pickard’s percussive thwacks shiver and hollow out as Borzone dreamily sings, “Might be the drum, trust me to be beaten.” His animalistic growls in “Burns” sound like Kurt Cobain singing a Talking Heads song backwards. “Stillness Blues” is all shredded repetition. In the blackened debris of a dance song blown to smithereens, you’ll find the industrial groove of “To the Devil.” Everything else comes and goes in droning moans of steel-colored electronica.
I don’t think Magazine is perfect, nor do I think it’s better than 45 Pounds, but YHWH Nailgun are trying to inject originality into a punk beat that is, all things considered, relatively stale once you get into bigger rooms than Night Club 101. Their brand of experimentalism has purchase in a time of style redundancy and revivalism, especially in their native city, where so many rock bands landing NME covers are nothing more than half-hearted Dolls, Sonic Youth, and Strokes remakes that needed more time in the oven. Call Magazine an LP, call it an EP; I don’t care what you do with it. Here’s a record that’s got people talking. Is it a gimmick? Maybe. But after a few listens, you’re in on the gag, and it’s pretty unsettling. [4AD]
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
