Yves Tumor, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds): REVIEW

Yves Tumor, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) (Warp)

Though no one really sounds like Yves Tumor, for the uninitiated, he’s the kind of artist you’d get with a pungent concoction of Prince, D’Angelo and the heavy ’90s rock/shoegaze scene. Their sound is like a shapeshifting mass, a darkened collapsing star that jumps from the sounds of earworm proto-punk basslines to the current R&B hip hop world, to the obscure shoegaze minor-keyed guitar world of Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine. This album is a marvel. The sheer imagination in the second half of “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood” — it’s just like falling in love with music again and again. The vocal techniques by Sean Bowie (Tumor’s real name) and mixing are stellar, as manned by Noah Goldstein (who engineered Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) and shoegaze mixer extraordinaire Alan Moulder. The slower numbers are still good, but do drop off in intensity. Still, that’s only two tracks of the 12. And then “Ebony Eye” bursts out with its organ-synth phrase and dark orchestral disco chorus — easily one of the best album closers I’ve heard in recent memory. 9/10 Trial Track: “Ebony Eye”

For more on Yves Tumor, please visit his website.

This review was originally published in the April issue of Cult MTL.

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