Yellow Swans Out Of Practice I

Billed as the first in a series of releases documenting the duo’s reunion last year, ‘Out of Practice I’ finds Pete Swanson and Gabriel Mindel Saloman raiding their archive to excavate a bunch of fragments now arranged into “verrrry loose” songs. The first side was recorded at Denver’s Glob in November last year, and leads in remarkably slowly, spluttering through a haze of garbled noise and close-miked madness before Saloman’s unmistakable sustained wails just about emerge thru the static. Their saturated gusts curl around choral fragments as their guitar slowly mutates into a shoegaze gloop of strangled harmonics. And still, they’re not quite done: when the smoke clears, acoustic twangs shuttle us into a different landscape entirely, flipping the piece on its head. Dubbed at Austin’s Oblivion Access in June, ‘Side B’ is a different rendering of the same basic principles. The duo sail into cacophony quicker, offsetting their pebble-dashed concrète with visceral squeals, and when the harmonic relief finally arrives, it’s blown into foghorn trails of blistered feedback. It’s YS at their most ferocious, spangling through a good few minutes of harsh noise before the feedback wilts into melancholy, leading us out with a slow hum as electrical sparks shimmer into the aether.