Screaming inward with YHWH Nailgun
If paranoia needs a new soundtrack, Luke Cartledge has found it in New York's buzziest experimental rock band, stylish in their anxiety but anxious nonetheless
I’ve been thinking about paranoia a lot lately. That’s not the same as being paranoid, but it doesn’t mean they’re not after you. It strikes me that there’s something almost seductive about paranoia – the sense of mystery and abstraction, of hidden knowledge and intrigue. Or maybe that’s just paranoia as aesthetic: the paranoia of film noir, Cold War melodrama, or this Thomas Pynchon book I’ve been reading, Bleeding Edge, which I can’t get out of my head. I’ll come back to that.
For the last few days, many of my definitely-not-paranoid thoughts, sparked off by the twists and turns of Bleeding Edge, have frequently been soundtracked by 45 Pounds, the debut LP from New York experimental rock band YHWH Nailgun. To a certain extent, it feels fitting: this is a strange, unsettled piece of work, stylish in its anxiety but anxious nonetheless. I’m always wary of projecting too much of one’s own emotional state onto music I’m consuming; that’s too neat, too solipsistic, too focused on consumer rather than producer, individual experience over cultural process. But what use is music writing that’s not self-centred, alienated and antisocial?
Anyway, when I mention to YHWH frontman Zack Borzone that I get a sense of paranoia from 45 Pounds, he just looks back at me through the Zoom screen. “Yeah, could be,” he says, nodding politely but expanding no further. It’s the perfect answer: neither confirm nor deny. Keep guessing.
Whatever exact affect YHWH are trying to express on 45 Pounds, there’s an undeniable tension in this music. Each track, rarely lasting longer than three minutes and often fewer than two, feels like a painful tightening or beating-out of a different bodily knot, forced into the tissue through blunt force or personal trauma. It’s a contorted, visceral record, industrial in power but red in tooth and claw. Sam Pickard’s drums pound and rattle around each track’s engine room, as Borzone’s anguished voice half-screams, half-drools his dislocated, suggestive lyrics like he’s dragging the dead weight of each song across the floor. Meanwhile, Jack Tobias’s irradiated electronics and Saugiv Rosenstock’s highly modulated guitars have an almost cyberpunk quality, shearing harmonic sparks off the metallic surfaces of Pickard’s percussion like speeding lines of code. There are so many struggles and contradictions here: between the physical and mechanical, the primal and the digital, the instinctive and the cerebral. All these tracks feel supremely boiled-down and lean, yet full to bursting point. As the record’s press release notes, it’s an information overload, made all the more overwhelming by the nagging feeling that absolutely all that information is vitally important. It’s not a relaxing listen.
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