Review Summary: Yuck post-umbilical cord
The stage is 2011, the image is a balding fetus with one banana shaped arm. The figure has a green collar, a top row of 30 mostly-circular teeth, four toes each on nubs that pass as legs, and a dot for genetailia. On September 30th, British indie/noise rock band Yuck released their second album titled, Glow & Behold. The album art for this is equally as childish and rudimentary, but tremendously more abstract and less grating for the incidental viewer.
In mid April, Yuck’s singer-frontman Daniel Blumberg left the band to pursue his solo-music career. Mid summer, the band released the single Rebirth from their sophomore album for free on their website. On first listen it took awhile to get into the Max Bloom’s vocals. They are significantly less distorted than Blumberg’s, as is the rest of the album. In the end, Bloom’s vocals do a good job of keeping a similar vibe but make it his own.
Glow & Behold, begins with an instrumental intro track titled Sunrise in Maple Shade that slowly adds drums, bass, horns, and organs to the winding guitar track and builds into a suppressed yet glorious crescendo. The album’s following tracks are a clear testimony to the band’s roots in such 90’s rock bands as My Bloody Valentine, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., and Teenage Fanclub. Some standout tracks in the album are Middle Sea, a energetic and anticipatory track that re-introduces the horns first heard on the intro track, and Glow Behold, the final track on the album a ballad reminiscent of Elliott Smith which ends peaks with a horns again, which is overtaken by a two minute distorted meandering guitar riff which is finally cut short mid strum.
Glow & Behold is cleaner, sometimes more ethereal album, with less distortion that the previous album, but a lot stronger as a whole. The good news is that the album art is less creepy, Max Bloom champions new vocals, and Yuck has given us a brilliant survey of 90s rock as interpreted for 2013. Now go find some speakers and submerge your ears in Glow & Behold.
