Review Summary: Dancing on dissociatives with a high grade fever
YHWH Nailgun are the kind of band that picks a starkly original sound and runs on that single rail like a blazing freight train into obscurity’s night. Like Buck Gooter, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, Buice, Truck Violence and countless others that deserved more attention than they ever got, YHWH Nailgun are a band that know that good night is coming, and are raging like Old Testament YHWH through it all. But unlike so many acts that build themselves around apocalyptic fury, this isn’t about intimidation—it’s not hostile, but rather relentless, a whirling fever dream that clings like flypaper, a plunge into disorienting places where the air congeals into a nausea-inducing haze.
45 Pounds makes picking apart the minutiae of genre tags feel like an inadequate exercise. The artists involved would most likely consider that high praise. Yes, it rocks. Yes, it opens with a squall of feedback into wild, woozy synthwork and feral expectorations of incoherent yowling, sure it might be built on the beams and girders of what we want to call noise rock, and yes, it is noisy, as the machine gun glitch-out of Pain Fountain amply demonstrates. Alright,so it’s really not that angry, whatever Zack Borzone may be bellowing. This isn’t any kind of confrontation, the last thing happening here is machismo posing or glandular flexion. But Mamaleek bellows n’ groans paired with frantic polyrhythms and woozy keyboards? The spiritual son of Zach Hill swinging an ungainly flesh weight in fun sized, luching grooves over the same klaxon guitars and nerve-stripping synthesizers? That’s a noise that buries itself directly in the depths of my spinal fluid.
The drums are the easy star of the show here, not a standalone heroic or anything, but rather the elevating element that carries this out of skin-crawling oddity and into something elevated from the bottomless morass of the weird. Thisthing dances, dances real ugly, lurching like an ungainly animal that isn’t meant to be on two legs, dances like an ox with a head wound.The lock this music has on itself is tightly wound enough to be a wild, swinging mechanical counterweight, a machine with no intention lurching in its drunken dance. Everything here bows to the unassailable altar of the groove.
Vocalist Zack Borzone has enough janky charisma dripping from his gills that he can afford to spew it around the stage with abandon. He doesn’t just shout or scream—he wheezes, he bellows, he snarls like he’s been gargling battery acid. Lord knows I can’t piece together more than scattered chunks of what he’s saying but the words aren’t exactly the point, are they? It’s not the language so much as it’s the voice, where it fits in the drums’ attack, the trough and crest of the waves of synthesizer, where a guttural bark pops against the time signature, where a whisper crawls underneath it. He’s the sole point and source for the band’s violence, and the heart and soul of it.
My new greatest desire in life is to catch this band live while they still exist. Is it going to alienate some people? Sure, if your affinity is for the turbid and stodgy. This kind of originality is as apt to draw cries of “bullshit” as it is intrigue. And for a band with this much life and honed-in focus in them, I think that really doesn’t make a difference. Could there stand to be a little more variety in their woozy, groove-driven attack? Yeah, sure. Could a dose of greater ambition really let this band flourish? Ok, maybe. But whether they burn out sooner or stick around long enough to become cult heroes, 45 Pounds is the kind of record that will leave a mark—on your eardrums, on your nerves, on your ability to process sound in a rational manner. Some bands are content to exist within the confines of a scene, to make their mark in a way that’s easily categorized and understood. YHWH Nailgun aren’t one of those bands.
