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April 3, 2020 - Warp
Yves Tumor, known also to people as Teams or Sean Bowie, has let loose their genre eschewing Heaven to a Tortured Mind. Embracing pop elements to weave an album of dark love languages, fans of Yves will recognize a penchant for the apocalyptic here in the not-necessarily-apocalyptic. But if we take love to its radical conclusion, which is transformation of one or more humans by another, we can arrive again at an inner apocalypse, so that works. Throughout the album, Yves’s lovescapes gyrate in the liminal spaces between reality and fantasy finding friction between closeness and distance.
Apple Music labels the album alternative, while the Guardian’s Alexis Pedridis describes it as, “experimental, capable of any genre, with an internal logic powering its shifts in mood.” Heaven To a Tortured Mind proves difficult, even undesirable, to pin down; its erratic nature necessary to its locomotion, a testament to what love looks like when it is not yoked to the traditions which Yves has clearly made efforts to distance from.
Even embracing simpler arrangements, with verse-chorus structure and a tendency to lean on repetitive choruses, unusual sample choices and a wide array of influences from psych-rock to electro-ballad steer the project far from the beaten path. Yves’s primary consistency is their vocal style, which teases the nasally edge of pop punk, but often side-steps any easily-named genre by double or triple-tracking their voice to neither harmony nor discord.
The first track, ‘Gospel for a New Century,’ opens sample heavy, an LA alley-stomper full of 70s-80s nostalgia. Fat horns introduce swagger, elongated pauses between breaks in the sample affirms swagger. After the vibe is established, Yves drops the sample (later using it in its disassembled form) and keeps the bassline, shifting to gentler gears. Yves begins with the love line, “I think I can solve it/ I can be your all/ ain’t no problem.” The lyrics flip flop again and again from “I can’t be there,” to “come and light my fire, baby,” after complaining, “‘cause when I really needed you the most, yeah/ You were gone then.” This is the internal logic a listener is riding. Without it, we’re unmoored, but Yves keeps us hanging on. There’s enough to interpret but not enough to exposit. It’s this careful space Heaven to a Tortured Mind keeps open and keeps us listening into.
In one of the most explicitly passionate songs, ‘Kerosene,’ the lyrics detail two partners’ mutability in service of the other, “I can be anything/ Tell me what you need.” Yves and Diana Gordon duet on the track making promises so depersonalized that the passion from both voices seems completely astral, “I can be your baby in real life, sugar/ I can live in your dreams.” ‘Kerosene’s’ depiction of love is an inverted negotiation in which the ante of what one can be for the other is continually raised. Besides featuring a vocal orgasm by Gordon, the song also reaches climax with the line “I need kerosene,” a bleeding-heart guitar riffs in response to all that’s already being offered. An edging toward mutual immolation. The desire is to be completely undone by love. It’s a common enough expression of imagined passion: a person yearns for freedom from its personality, to be animated by desire and consumption and nothing more. Fans will be pleased to be here, still in the realm of ashes.
Yet within ‘Kerosene,’ the peculiar absence of bodies, other than the named “boy” and “girl,” plants a listener distinctly in metaphor, as though there were nothing beyond an imagined object of affection: “I can be your real life sugar/ I can live in your dreams/ Will you be my fantasy, little baby?/ You’re just what I need.” The song begins with dreamy synths and clean rainy-day drums with a muted studio crispness. Yves enters lilting into the reverb, “I can be anything/ Tell me what you need.”
The drums pick up. Diana Gordon enters and says “I ain’t like them other girls/ Look me in the eye, tell me I’m the one,” which for its face-value triteness becomes a poignant line in her cadence and tonal sensibility. A heavy electric guitar comes in and it’s a ballad now. The thing wails. The sonic powers are great. This is the song. It’s powerful despite resistance, despite what is tempting to understand as banal repetition without nuance.
I installed an outdated AC window unit between my second and third listen, and not only do I feel better, but the white noise fits in well.
The fifth song on the album, ‘Hasdallen Lights’ is likely a loose anagram for Hessdalen Lights. The track’s reference is to orbs of light which appear and flit in the sky over Hessdalen Valley that caught the attention and documentation by non-locals in the 1980’s. Naturally, the lights provide a site for theories to live and argue. Some theories consider the phenomenon the result of decaying radon, one puts forth that the Earth is acting like a battery discharging little electrical orbs in Hessdalen, another details ball lightning, which is a trip in itself, and of course there’s the UFO community.
As Mark Durant has put it: “Once a thriving mining community, [The Hessdalen Valley] has now become one of those forlorn frontiers where the mysterious and the desperate coincide to create a new culture of wonder and paranoia.” And such is the nature of Heaven to a Tortured Mind. Featuring far-out plucky guitars and a slightly syncopated groove, ‘Hasdallen Lights’ finds the mystical quality urbanites tend to ascribe to country-folk of any devotion—as a people capable of conduiting the numinous. It is there, not with us, that the religious and the holy abides; meanwhile, our last rightful visitation with the supernatural lies in romance, in our undoing and the undoing of all that we’ve built up around us. The lyrics abide by the pop template. Slight permutations add layers of meaning, but for the most part we’re being asked (or someone is being asked), “What do you crave? / How do you feel?” Incorporating a call and response vocal arrangement and a gentle string section, Yves creates a romantic atmosphere in which questions like, “what are you running from?” —efforts to understand a partner— materialize and float about in a moment of mystery and desperation.
In a 2016 interview Yves said, “I only want to make hits. What else would I want to make?” And in a sense that what we have here, or that’s at least what the internal logic is driving toward. The songs are elusive, not quite imbued with the mysterious tangibility that a hit has. Yet their effervescence is part of what brings intrigue to Yves’s latest project, what makes one say this might be the future of the ‘hit.’ Those familiar with the artist know that gender nonconformity plays an integral role in their stage and public presence. In a lot of ways, Heaven to a Tortured Mind reads and sounds like a reverse engineering of Prince coming into his role as sexual icon. Yet Yves Tumor has the gift and perhaps the burden of modernity, the extension of nuance, which makes sexual exploration and rock iconography tenuous. Yves made an album full of songs that sound like hits. Whether they will be or not is yet to be seen. But the difficulty in pinning down Yves Tumor’s sound, their rhythmic and stylistic choices, rules out a definitive “no.” ⛰️