Thoughts on Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume

Zach Talks about Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume

 Fucking chill out with the album titles, would ya? I always want to recommend Yves Tumor to friends:

“Dude, you gotta check ‘em out. ‘Heaven With Lots of Scythes’ or ‘An Asymptomatic Worldview’ or something like that. There are some classics on those ones.”

Yves Tumor takes what most people think of as cold, sterile science and dresses it up in flowers, silken drapes, and bandpass filters. This album clearly addresses the laws of thermodynamics through a spiritual lens. “Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume” even describes the idea in the name itself. The essence of life, which comprises all of us, is morphed, mangled, and manured through time, but it is never taken from or added to: It is simply reimagined. Energy takes a cyclical journey around the universe, which is why Yves recognizes god as a circle. The energy that we’re made of never goes away, so all the love and passion we are able to express to each other in the physical world never goes away. Our essence still exists even after our physical forms do not. Being free from physical pain, our emotions reach an ideal space in which to roam. This is heaven. Heaven is all around us. It surrounds us like a hood. And you didn’t need Siddharta Guatema or Alan Watts to preach that bullshit to you. All you needed was to crank the fucking volume knob up on some Yves Tumor.

A Type A personality might have an issue with the structuring across this record. A lot of their stuff is through-composed, focusing less on where the breakdown, versus, and choruses belong. Yves turns this into a strength. All transitions between sections of songs and even between songs are exciting. Making their songs shapeless helps the record remain true to its themes. The listener can feel celestial inside of the album’s graceful and vast soundscapes. And yet the mixing on this album makes a lot of its elements seem out of reach. The distant vocals, the filtered guitars, the reverberant pad synths: They all conjure an image in which the subject is off in the distance, and Yves Tumor appears as the psychopomp who guides us through this surreal place in search of that subject. Do we find it? That is up to you.

I have to do a quick shoutout to “Purified by The Fire” on this album, which totally came out of left field in terms of its sound. This album follows a pretty standard indie art rock style until the intro of this song kicks in, which sounds like a sampled hip-hop beat (actually reminiscent of “Rhinestone Cowboy” [DOOM, not Campbell]). The nature of sampling, taking a pre-existing piece of music and recycling it to take on new purpose while still retaining the essence of its source, brilliantly aligns with the theme of the project. Yves Tumor goes further with it, and turns the piece into a thrashing, nightmarish dance number, like if all the Titans from The Rumbling started two-stepping in this mother fucker.