Praying to an Empty Sky on a Summer Evening - Yves Tumor Opener
A single glance of burning love -
Yves Tumor makes me feel selfish. Indulgent would be the right word. Reminiscent of how I stare at myself in my mirror with joint smoke wafting from my nostrils as I pose up and down obnoxiously vain—as my hips sway from side to side in the privacy of my bedroom, I am finding the rhythm, searching. At the same time, I still move, and dance, savoring the taste of sound. In this moment, I’m sitting in the audience above the wide floor surrounded by empty seats basking like a queen with platinum and sunset braids pulled, wrapped, and then tied into a “messy bun” balanced like a crown on my head. I can feel the first chord then notes echo in my bones.
Do I care that this is technically a Saint Vincent show? No, I just found out who she was looking for these tickets.
But the dark-skinned black man with a 2000s RAWR XD Hot Topic vibe to his overall aesthetic? A black David Bowie in patterned skinny jeans from the early 2010s? With a black and white painted face and fingerless gloves on? Who looks like he’d steal from Spencer’s purely out of anti-capitalist rage only to upcharge his horde on Depop for upper-middle-class kids to purchase? Punk rock core. Afrofurturism inspired. Sun Ra impassioned. Yes, I’m in the stands for him. As he opens, I’m surprised, offended, and relieved there aren’t more people.
It’s just us and him as a pillar of sharp instant light smites his form while he electrically jump-starts into the first song, transforming the theater into a steaming beaker in a lab. Unexplained chemicals morph into mysterious gases tapering out the spout. It can only be handled with specific laminated instructions near an eye shower for catastrophic spills, gloved hands, and thick plexiglass goggles — still not enough in the face of this casually explosive nexus.
There is a hiss as colorful neon red and blue lights blink on and off, and the chemistry lab opens for the shining spectacle on stage. Shades and hues flash, striated in and out, cutting shadows into lines. The undercurrent of the acoustic bass overwhelms my heart, beating alongside it underneath my skin.
The smoke wafting from the corners of the stage transforms and crafts a thick opaque cradle around the band, sliced by the ear-sharp electric twanging “chrng” as the lyrical substances barely contained by the room all at once combust, fizzle, and react through the opening performance experiment.
There is a bruising tight way Yves's knees knock together as he grasps onto the microphone with black polish on his nails, pleading, phallic, desperate to convey to the space he made and controls with each head-splitting rhapsody.
I’m asking myself at this point, what exactly am I experiencing? Am I sinking into the galactical Milky Way heaven-scape on the album cover? Am I suffering from a collective delusion of grandeur? How long for the next reaction? Color change? Chemical flow? What exactly is this?
Is it the trilling sound problems synchronizing through the purposefully disjointed discordant notes, characteristic of Yves as he yells, then croons at us through God Is a Circle? As he vibrates toward the guitarist, looming, imploring, and reminding us that everyone we’ve loved has loved someone else? It’s the same dance, over and over again, that hurts because we are alive and deeply feel, a relativity Yves Tumor has captured through his specific sound and aesthetic.
Is this R&B? Is it Rock? Alternative? An experimental, computer punk-pop, Hyper-punk-riff condensed into never seen before Hypo-Metal? Communicating noise and poetry into a mad sound of the soul that can only be told through his perspective? Self-absorbed youth noise?
It is certainly not music that can be just danced to or simply screamed. Jiving is a requirement; hip movement is necessary. This is music meant to connect with the purposeful intimacy of locking eyes and looking away, capturing the essence of rebellious black joy and expression.
Head half-shaved with dark shades on despite being indoors, Yves Tumor gyrates on the long line of the microphone, right leg hooked around the length, arched and thump-thump-thumping on the beat, fingers cavalierly gesturing to the crowd. About his conflict with the concept of God while demanding to be revered as one on stage. Dilapidated notes are stricken through contrametric beats while an ambient pop soul vibe uh-un-uh-un-un-un-un oscillates through psychedelic ascending notes in Echolalia.
Each chord tears through any silence, reminiscent of Yves’s desires to never be dull, or worse, predictable, as funk is interwoven into the sound of Heaven to a Tortured Mind that evolves into a newer knocked-knee-one-lone-dyed-bang-over-the-right-eye monster in Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds).
He shows his storytelling in the mechanical radio echoes of “Be aggressive, be, be aggressive” in Operator as Yves asks the universe, who could be a mental health care operator on the other line, for help. Where he is tortured by the mental strain of being the neglected third of a sexually adventurous but emotionally reserved married couple, leaving him in the child-like position of having to earn affection, looking for the right actions to please and be kept. He deeply reverently believes in his desirability, ego supported and threatened by the knowledge that he can be thrown away.
He sings in psychedelic promises of pleasurable heaven in crushed velvet. With the thought that selflessness on Earth will lead to Heaven, this image of him forms, pleasant and reverent in Midwestern church pews, young and impressed upon, dressed in his Sunday best, eager to please God for entrance and acceptance that sirens in his thoughts.
There is no pathway for where the songs go, to predict where Yves's calm discordant voice will veer in mumble admonishment and damning, which key will power which song through its traversing lyrics and optional rhythm or metric that still functions like a futuristic machine.
Instead, it’s an explosion after the first hesitant pleasurably surprised taste of consuming something new while he asks you, me, the audience, in the heady lights and sparkling synths and popping rifts, if you’ll think of him only.
He begs and wails, the drum’s looping percussion beating to the sharp and lethal chorus repeated religiously to the front and back of the crowd, close in and far out where I remember I am seated and alive. With swagger, Yves times his moments matching the in and out of the fluctuating lights to the head-nodding heart-beats that syncopate back to the heart into the ribs and back again, to all the other lonely souls in the room.
Yves Tumor’s firm vocal fry melodically presses on to a steady in-and-out-of-tune chord and inhale-exhale of breaths, insisting that the never-before-seen arrangement of harmonies and sounds is the same old dance. (Same old dance). (Same old dance). And it ends as suddenly as it starts.
