DOVE YELLOW SWANS - LIVE DURING WAR CRIMES #2 CD (RTB#16) REVIEWS THE ONE TRUE DEAD ANGEL Five untitled tracks of synapse-frying white noise by Yellow Swans, recorded live in the first two months of 2006. The first track is a formless but formidable burst of sonic uberviolence, but it's the second track that really sets the mood for the album. Chunky sounds, metallic clanging, and faraway pained vocals reminiscent of the first Godflesh ep quickly resolve into an abstract landscape of fear and uncertainty over a grinding noise-hum rhythm; eventually a fragmentary beat even briefly pops up in the sonic fog, but it's that hypnotic wall of noise that remains the focus of attention, regardless of its volume or prominence in the mix, threatening to shave your eardrums down to tissue paper. For just two guys (Pete Swanson, in charge of electronics and howling, and GMS, exerting control over art-damaged noise guitar and even more electronics), they make an awful lot of racket (this is good, by the way). The wall of sonic filth gets chunkier and denser on the third track, which is not quite as intense but just as willfully obnoxious. The fourth song almost sounds like an actual song happening in the background (way back there, to be sure) while hooligans break shit over fuzzy brown noise while wrecked on cheap booze and cough syrup, or perhaps like an auto accident being played back in slow motion on cheap, malfunctioning equipment. The final track returns to the hypno-noise voodoo and slow creeping doom, gradually growing from a hypnotic but relatively restrained dark-ambient vibe with some metallic clanking going on to terrifying canyons of drone as implied (and sometimes not so implied) bursts of violence drift like bursting clouds in the background. And then there's the shrieking, high-pitched buzzsaw of sound that permeates the increasingly sick sound, the equivalent of scraping your inner ear with an icepick. Heavy, heavy stuff, doom childe, and likely to make you deaf, maybe even sterile, in the process. VITAL WEEKLY #546 It's highly likely that of the five pieces on 'Live During War Crimes #2' I witnessed one in concert: it was recorded in January and February 2006 on various concerts, and one of them was in Extrapool. Of course I can tell which it is. But the concert by Dove Yellow Swans was great: a wall of noise, played on one or two (can't remember exactly) guitars and a whole barrage of electronics. The feedback drone they offered, worked in quite a psychedelic manner. Since a playing session of the recordings in the household environment can't be as loud as in a concert space, you could wonder if it works. Well, I think it does work also on a slightly softer volume. The psychedelic qualities of guitars feeding back, distorting through a bunch of effect pedals are still loud and clearly present, and the five untitled cuts surely represent the various qualities Dove Yellow Swans have to offer. From loud and mean to loud and heavily controlled, such as in the final piece. Great noise. (FdW) AQUARIUS "This is part two of the Dove Yellow Swans' (remember, different 'D' word every time) two part (maybe more?) series, Live During War Crimes. On the first volume, they took older releases, out of print tapes, cd-r's and other long gone goodies, chopped 'em up, recontextualized them, and created a whole new chunk of brilliantly bilious bluster. For part two, the band recorded a live set back in the beginning of this year, and it's a doozy. This is less splattery abstract noise, and more huge bulldozing walls of blown out fuzz, almost like SUNNO))) jamming with Sunroof! Tons of low end, massive slow shifting tectonic plates of sound, grinding and creaking, but mostly rumbling, a long drawn out muted roar. Thick and black, utterly dense tarpit drones, like some hellish sound system, playing every single Wolf Eyes record at once, all run through some old rickety distortion pedal, and broadcast from a million woofers buried under two feet of silt. Or like listening to a Merzbow record on the wrong speed, with the bass ALL the way up and the treble ALL the way down, A mighty, murky, slithering, slow motion corrosive crawl... packaged in a cool oversized full color sleeve with a little felt lined pocket inside to hold the cd.