Yowie – Taking Umbrage (Skin Graft) – “Frantically disorganised as ants sometimes appear there is always a purpose, a direction, a method in their apparent madness…” – Yes, it is hyper-composed rock and yes, Yowie’s is an instantly recognisable sound and yes, all that scratching is making me itch, all that gibber and twitch as it were. Have we got this right? We rarely do get things right and things have kind of fallen between the cracks and Yowie are sounding even more hard-boiled and challenging then ever which of course is a very good thing and what are words worth anyway? 

“For Taking Umbrage, the ambition of the material demanded Yowie assemble an international line-up with impeccable credentials. The band now features Daniel Kennedy (also of the band Cleric, which has its own progressive metal oeuvre, and has worked with the likes of John Zorn and Trey Spruance), as well as Jack Tickner (Basil’s Kite, Wollongong, and solo microtonal work), in addition to founding member, Shawn “Defenestrator” O’Connor 

Wordsworth? Beauteous forms? There are no words, no I don’t mean that this is an instrumental album (it is, their longest album yet and the one that apparently took the longest to create, these things don’t just happen), I mean there are no words to help us dance around the architecture of this latest very very (very) hard-boiled Yowie album. This is high-end playing/composing/painting/rocking, they kind of bend, it is bendy music, stoat music, bendy stout music that never stops pecking at you, flying pecking relentless stouts with beaks! You know when you’re at a card table and you’re trying to watch the dealer’s hands and those hands are going way too fast for you to think up something to say to that damn dealer who might well be thinking of cheating you? Not that I am suggesting that in any kind of way that Yowie are a dishonest band or that they might deal you a dubious hand in a card game or any of that. Yowie are probably are one of the most musically honest bands on the planet and what is there to be said about the rather unique sound they make? What do you want me to say? I could say that it sounds like insects running back and forth over your face while you’re neck deep in a sand mountain and that you want it to stop and there again you never want it to stop? There’s probably some clever musician thing to say about the structure of what they’re doing, they almost certainly playing in some weird time signature, Yowie clearly are properly incredibly progressive, there’s is a meticulous approach to composition, they are people who need to be challenging themselves artistically, it feels natural though, as composed as it all is, it feels instinctive and natural, it never sounds forced, it feels just right and rather than analyse it I’m going to go make a peanut butter and blackcurrant jam sandwich (that’s jelly to you Americans) and just enjoy the head-pecking pleasure of it and at the same time tell you that the new Yowie album is as excellent as their albums always are, that they have probably raised theitr already very high bar yet again and that without ever repeating what they’ve done before, this is very very obviously (and rather brilliantly) another fine Yowie album.      

Shawn “Defenestrator” O’Connor had this to say on the track Skrimshander (the second track from the album to be made public and for which a video has just been released) – “Skrimshander is a real challenge to play. It was composed with the intention of taking you on an excursion, if not an all-out journey. We took a relatively jaunty groove theme and then tortured it until it began to transmogrify. The pressure of said torment causes the theme to collapse midway through, but then it gets angry, dusts itself off, and fights back until we are doing something totally and rhythmically frantic. By the end, it is an all-out battle for internal coherence, and the question of who wins remains ambiguous. Audiences respond really well to this one-we had a pit of sorts open up (which is hard to pull off; odd-time pits wherein the meter keeps shifting in a blast beat is rather demanding of the audience!), and at one point people just started screaming, which in fact is the desired result. Also, I can’t help but point out that at the end of the video, as the camera pans to the crowd, you see Michael Jung of Alice Donut in the audience, which for us is pretty damned cool”.

About Yowie (from the label Bandcamp page): For more than a quarter century, Skin Graft Records’ Yowie have been blowing minds with their utterly unique, baffling compositions and notoriously ecstatic must-be-seen-to-be-believed live performances. Their first album, 2004’s Cryptooology was an instant cult classic, has become a permanent resident of countless “Best Math Rock Albums of All-Time” lists, and has cemented itself as the ultimate “dare” for ambitious musicians to learn. Since then, Yowie have released two more full-length albums, a double split 7-inch, teamed up with The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow, and earlier this year, released a split with France’s equally unclassifiable Pili Coït.

I see a previous review is quoted on the the label’s Bandcamp page;  “Frantically disorganized as ants sometimes appear there is always a purpose, a direction, a method in their apparent madness…” – The Organ  (although I’d like to think we never put a z in disorganised!) 

Hey look, a new Yowie album is always going to be good news, is always going to be big news, this is as good as any of the beautifully crafted albums they have made and when (if?) we do make it to those end of year lists again this year then of course Taking Umbrage is going to figure right up there just as previous Yowie albums have done. You don’t need our words, here’s the Bandcamp, go explore, go reward yourself, as brilliant as always… (sw) 

Taking Umbridge is out on October 3rd, find all the details via Bandcamp (the label would probably love you to pre-order it on Bandcamp Friday September 5th when all proceeds go to the label and Badcape wave their cut)

Previously

ORGAN THING: Pili Coït and Yowie, a split album on Dur et Doux and SkinGraft Records – “Split? There’s nothing divisive about it”. Two highly recommended bands challenging both themselves and you and me with what surely will be one of the albums of the year when it comes to list these things…

ORGAN THING: SkinGraft Records, 150 not out, and what gloriously celebration of a compilation album featuring those Flying Luttenbachers, Terms, David Yowie, Bobby Conn, Lovely Little Girls, Pili Co​ï​t, Tijuana Hercules and quite a few more…

ORGAN THING: That debut Terms album then, people from Grand Ulena, from Yowie, like Jackson Pollock feeding spiders down your ears…