YHWH Nailgun’s noise gets apocalyptic on Magazine

The band doesn’t even try to make these songs sum up to anything coherent: each song hits, fades, and the next introduces itself, just to fade again in record time. On each, synthesist Jack Tobias puts down ominous chords and motifs at the worst moments; guitarist-that-sounds-like-a-synthesist Saguiv Rosenstock plays what could very well be the transposed sheet music of a dying dog’s final whimpers; vocalist Zack Borzone moans against the beat in broken Revelations-inspired word association poetry; and drummer Sam Pickard works like the devil to hold the whole operation together. Right when you get accustomed to one song’s palate, it pauses, waits a few seconds, and smacks you across the face with another – ten tracks across eleven minutes.

YHWH Nailgun, the quartet behind this monstrosity, have been roughly this confrontational for a hot second, but it’s never been this bad. Here, they ditch the rototoms and vocal reverb that marked their previous sound, abandoning nearly every semblance of tunefulness and lurching further towards pummelling, nearly directionless, apocalyptic noise – as the final track fades out and the first track fades in again, you feel like you could be stuck here forever. Debut album 45 Pounds took the occasional moment to craft something that could resemble a hook, or a melody, or a short flash of beauty, before diving back into scheduled programming. Magazine will have absolutely none of it.

Perhaps there’s a world where this album could have run longer than “Starless”, but it could have never assaulted the listener like this does. The longest track here, the opener, is barely a minute and a half; the shortest, the title track, blasts as Borzone makes gun noises and cries “bleed lamb, bleed lamb, bleed” before it cuts off abruptly after just thirty seconds and change. It hits viscerally enough to put the most aggressive grindcore album to shame, and yet for an album so resonant it barely sounds human – something more like the broken radio transmissions of an alien planet that just started reading the Bible, the mathematically generated music of a computer trapped in cyberspace against its will, the sounds assembled by four possessed middle schoolers who didn’t learn how to play their instruments. The result, somehow, is brilliant: uncontrolled chaos, presented in the most controlled of settings.