It does no good to say that Yellow Swans are any of the following things: Improvised noise, art-damaged, hardcore, industrial, avant-garde, revolutionary, crazy, fuckin' crazy. Like the works of any successful composer, they are what you make of them. Theirs is also music you're likely to respond differently to each time you hear it, and by that I don't mean that sometimes you'll find yourself passively reaching for it, while others you simply won't be in the mood; Yellow Swans have a more intense effect on your emotions and impulses.
At best, I feel at home inside their music, like these songs were written specifically for me and I can kick my feet up, let down my manners, and generally be part of them. That's a profound feeling. Equally profound is how much I can hate this record at times. Feeling alienated and utterly worn down after the first track, "Police Eternity", I've often thrown in the towel and vowed never to hear it again. But my inner masochist always find some excuse to return, and I've generally found the album more enjoyable with each subsequent listen.
Yellow Swans are almost too adept for the type of music they play: Shrill, anarchic, noise-laden, and largely improvised, their aural base-jumping in theory embodies the spirit of deliberate improvisers like Glenn Branca and Sachiko M, but in practice identifies more closely with the stridency of Wolf Eyes and Merzbow. If you must, yes, this is some heady shit. In fact, Bring the Neon War Home is often dauntingly noisy. Propelled by a duly menacing industrial beat, "Police Eternity" opens things on an unambiguous note, all ring-modulated guitar peals spiraling off like a video game laser gone haywire, mammoth glaciers of feedback plodding insistently forward, and unintelligible vocal yowling. But as with all five tracks on this collection, there's a pinioning melodic undercurrent, faint but insistent, that I believe is what makes Yellow Swans so compelling.
"Police Eternity" is easily the most confrontational (and thus potentially off-putting) track on Neon War. Clocking in at just over four minutes, it's almost a condensed version of the album as a whole, melding spacious textures, propulsive industrial beats, and grating feedback in one tumescent package. Other songs branch off down these individual tributaries: "High on the Mountain of Love" is an avalanche of sound; unwieldy and arrhythmic, the only thing certain about it is its persistent, all-encompassing forward momentum. Elsewhere, "Neon War" is the most melodically top-heavy, riffing for 13 minutes atop a pounding beat, barely audible bassline, and quaking, gradually decomposing guitar loop. The untitled closing track, meanwhile, is a hushed, ruinous skeleton of the music of which it lies in wake, vaster, more imagistic, and even delicate by Yellow Swans' standards.
The thing at once so intimidating and admirable about Yellow Swans is how they eschew the reductive "anybody could do that" branding foisted upon many noise and improv acts. As entropic and abrasive as their compositions can wax, there's an unflagging virtuosity to them that at once demands attention and punishes the listener for getting too close. Like Branca's monolithic "Lesson No. 2", Yellow Swans are staggeringly deliberate; their patience and acute attention to detail allow them to pack a beguilingly huge wallop, and Bring the Neon War Home prevails on density, not girth.
