Yvette – Process
“We will not profit off this record, most people will not hear it, and of those who do, many will not like it.” So reads part of the press release for Yvette’s bruising industrial debut Process. It’s a curiously honest (if self-deprecating statement) from the label, but is it also a solid dose of anti-marketing for an anti-music LP? It’s undoubtedly a ferocious noise-punk record that truly batters the ears in places, but whether it’s actually intolerable requires context. Many of the people who “will not like” this record will find its synth sirens, gruelling feedback and screeching shrapnel too much to bear, though in truth such blasts pass quickly. The recording volume too is often so loud that Process seems to bulldoze even when played quietly, the unholy result of the many takes it took to strip the album back to today’s rabid state. Yet those with any sort of prior in the more extreme ends of experimental audio will be more receptive to the destructive NYC duo, and it’s an argument that’s kinda redundant anyway when you realise frontman Noah Kardos-Fein’s soothing, dreamy voice drapes itself over the album’s broken glass and razor-wire like some special other’s comforting arm.
It makes sense then that Process’s most abrasive cut, “Absolutes”, is an instrumental. Its buzzsaw guitar and static combine for an exhilarating ride, but one – crucially – that still conforms to the modern 4-minute pop rule. If this were instead a 10-minute blowout it’d be used to torment terrorists into submission tomorrow. Simply put, Process isn’t the muscular bully it at first seems to be. You see, it has feelings too: the snippets of beauty and melody that light the way through the otherwise snarling “Holding Nothing”; the lost-down-a-well post-punk tick of “Mirrored Walls” (until in cruises a huge graunching drone that renders everything in its path into a post-apocalyptic take on Death From Above 1979). Elsewhere, the frenetic spectre of HEALTH resides in the sheer sonic nihilism of “Tempered Glass” and Rick Daniel’s heavy-calibre flak drumming helps evoke the spirit of Wire in “Pure Pleasure”, but Process is all Yvette nonetheless and it deserves to be heard by a great number of people. Tough Love may unfortunately still be right on it not turning a profit though.
Best tracks: “Mirrored Walls” and “Tempered Glass”
~Process is given its UK release on 5th May 2014 via Tough Love.~