Image Credit: Pitchfork, 2023
Sean Bowie’s musical career has been characterized by change and experimentation, a hard break from the 2000s Knoxville, Tennessee in which they grew up. Bowie told Dazed in 2018 that the “very conservative, racist, homophobic, sexist environment…wasn’t very constructive growing up and trying to be creative.” Instead of experimenting with drugs and getting high with their peers, Bowie taught themself to play the guitar, piano, drums, and bass.
Bowie’s music and persona has shifted with their penchant for a new, unique sound. Originally performing as Teams and releasing music that AllMusic called “post-chillwave,” Bowie’s career trajectory changed after meeting the experimental hip-hop artist Mykki Blanco in 2012 and then joining Blanco on tour for two and a half years. In 2015, Bowie released two EPs under the name “Yves Tumor,” one of which came through Blanco’s label, Dogfood MG. In the years since, Yves Tumor has signed with two record labels and released four studio albums. While the music has jumped from sound to sound, Yves Tumor has had one growth: increasing critical and commercial success.
Yves Tumor’s latest album, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds), mirrors the artist’s crescendo across their career with a bold combination of sounds across time. With Praise a Lord, Tumor and co-producer Noah Goldstein have invited some of their favorite artistic influences to a potluck and have each sprinkled a bit of their homemade sauces into each dish. The result is an esoteric mixture of evocative nostalgia and visions of the future.
The album’s opener, “God Is a Circle” is a haunting harbinger of the tracks to come. In the opening verse, Bowie sings “There’s places in my mind that I can’t go / There’s people in my life I still don’t know.” With backing vocals from hyper pop artist Ecco2k, Praise a Lord signals that just as much as it will look backwards, it will attempt to hold its ground in the wave of hyperpop that is taking over the minds and blogs of critics (thank you, 100 gecs).
While “God Is a Circle” is a strong thesis statement for the album, the front half of Praise a Lord does more work in creating a simple story for Yves Tumor’s ill-fated love than it does in pushing the boundaries of lyrics, instrumentation, or production. The front half of Praise a Lord follows the descent into the toxic and all-consuming relationship (in the “Lovely Sewer,” as it was). By “Meteora Blues,” Yves Tumor is fully in love, singing “Red cherry lips / Thought I found you in my dream.” But these tracks are child’s play compared to what Tumor has in store.
The album takes a turn at “Parody,” a song with a name fitting for the experimentally imitative nature of the album. Here, Tumor realizes that their lover is a “parody of a popstar” who “behaved like a monster”: the first sign of the troubles of their relationship. Perhaps the clearest of influences comes on “Operator,” when even the most casual of Prince listeners cannot mistake the spoken word intro as something other than an ode to the late rock legend. How Yves Tumor manages to employ Prince’s crooning so smoothly throughout the jam should not be overlooked considering artists who have been less successful at doing so. (Sorry Kevin Abstract, your Andre 3k voice on “Georgia” stuck out like a sore thumb.)
The shoegaze rock influence shines through equally brightly, helped by production from legendary rock-producer Alan Moulder. Moulder, having worked with shoegaze studs like My Bloody Valentine and Ride and eventually some of the 90s rock artists who overtook them, knows just as well as anyone how to mix the sounds of the rock past with those of the future. On “Fear Evil Like Fire,” Yves Tumor blurs the line between vocals and instrumentation with grinding guitars and vocals. By the time they sing “Can’t tell the difference,” it’s unclear if it’s Yves Tumor or their guitar singing about the gray between life and heaven.
In an album with low lyrical density and underwhelming depth, the punk-rock “In Spite of War” carries the most lyrical weight. Tumor sings “Your beauty blooms in early day / In the fall, I smell decay.” Tumor sees the writing on the wall of the evil in their once-promising partner and, ultimately, the downfall of their love. Tumor does not tell the story of love gone wrong in any particularly novel way, but on “In Spite of War,” it is more succinct than any song that comes before it.
The album’s final two tracks are its best. Truthfully, by the time that I heard “Purified by the Fire,” I thought the album was finished and that I had begun listening to a beat from The Alchemist (half-expecting to hear Freddie Gibbs start rapping). It is a soulful crash that emerges, diminishes, and returns over 3.5 minutes, making you question if you even needed to hear Yves Tumor’s vocals for Praise a Lord to be the incredible work it is. The ultimate track “Ebony Eye” shows that this thought is wrong. On the psychedelic track that calls to mind Tame Impala, Tumor has their most fruitful combination of sound, word, and feeling. The futuristic sound of rock that Tumor brings to the table on this track doubles the unsettling nature of Tumor’s acceptance of paralysis at the gates of heaven.
Tumor has proven yet again that their music can go in any number of directions and still feel calculated and novel. “There’s parts of me I don’t even know yet” they sing on “God Is a Circle”. After listening to Praise a Lord, one can only hope that Tumor will share these findings with the rest of us.
Oliver Adler ’24 (oliveradler@college.harvard.edu) writes album reviews for the Indy.