It’s no secret that Yves Tumor He has spent his entire career trying to reach the divine. The pristine or blurred figure of God appears frequently in his discography, both textually and as an inevitability suggested by his desire and commitment to the metamorphic and omnipotent, to embody and possess it all. Away from the sulfurous murmur of his first ambient and noise releases and the tortuous but triumphant ascent of hell narrated in “Safe In The Hands of Love” (2018), their 2020 LP, “Heaven To A Tortured Mind”embraced earthly pleasures but no less sophisticated for that, and canonized Tumor as his own archetype of God of Rock, boosted by a more polished and concise sound and an overflowing sensuality.
A similar divinity – mundane, light, universal – pursues his new length, “Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)”. While it is Tumor’s least ambitious and daring project to date, it is an album of high concepts and textures that brings him closer to pop than ever while maintaining his position in the pantheon of experimental artists.
Historically, Tumor has played by expectations; his modus operandi has been to break structures and warp genres: the influences on his songs (from Prince to My Bloody Valentine) were palpable, instinctively easy to recognize and equally elusive, impossible to pinpoint. Industrial and glam rock entangled with soul and R&B, their music functioning as a collage that often thrived on disappointment, but in which all boundaries dissolved. In “Praise A Lord Who Chews…”however, an aura of accessibility reigns, as if the conflict that was bubbling beneath the surface has dissipated: prominent basses, post-punk guitars, and goth rock keyboards stand out and take on a certain rigidity, almost entirely shaping some of the lyrics. less disruptive tracks on the record, such as “Operator” o “Meteor Blues”.
Even so, even when he seems to give in to the conventions of a genre, Tumor always finds a way to turn the prism and show us a new reflection among what we think we already know: the light falsetto that he directs “Parody” it distorts and disintegrates when the theme is turned off; the minimalist and decayed air of “Lovely Sewer” takes on an almost soulful intensity when Tumor’s partner takes the reins on the chorus; “Heaven Surrounds Us Like A Hood” retains some of the electric carnality that motivated his previous LP and also includes some of the darker and more disconcerting images of the project, while “Fear Evil Like Fire” watches him get his R&B superstar guise back on.
Thematically, Tumor still shows a certain fixation with the macabre (the lead single, “God Is a Circle”opens the album with a shriek in medias res and is built on agitated breathing, establishing an atmosphere of almost claustrophobic paranoia) and by passion engaged in violence (the color red emerges as a leitmotif, an indicator of both lust and fatality), but in “Praise A Lord Who Chews…”, the artist mainly contemplates more tender and direct concerns, and throughout the tracks he tries to locate an elusive remedy for his malaise that he often refers to as God: “Are you my Lord and Savior?”inquires in “Operator”; “Looked up to God / She looked so good”, repite en “Echolalia”; y una voz extraña confiesa en “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood” que “I love the color blue beacuse / It’s in the sky / And that’s where God is”.
This God continues to be an abstract symbol, but the silhouette of the faith that Tumor professes is much more defined in this project: the divine is found in love. It is the conclusion that closes the album, when a second female voice joins Tumor in the cathartic chorus of “Ebony Eye” and both are lifted by a radiant string section: “I can’t describe this glowing light / There’s no other way than the pearly gates / I found my holy place”. For someone who has dedicated most of his work to investigating our innermost gloom, this denouement is almost as radical as the masterful sonic fluidity Tumor has shown he is still capable of.