Zweizz
The Yawn Of The New Age
3.2
With an indecipherable black metal-looking logo colored in a most obnoxious shade of pink, many references to gay oriented musical events in Europe on the mandatory MySpace page, and an album title that borders on parody, I expected to be overwhelmed with irony and mischief with Zweizz’s Yawn Of The New Age. There had to be an email sent just so I didn’t accidentally embarrass us both. I’ve never heard nor reviewed anything remotely like this before, and being patient and open-minded was a serious trial while absorbing the total and absolute strangeness of this disc. Irony and mischief? If only it were that easy.
It’s safe to assume Yawn…is not a metal album, and only barely resembles industrial music when actual songwriting is attempted. This isn’t Burzum, it’s definitely not Skinny Puppy, and I’d sooner likenen this to Aphex Twin as I’d compare Belphegor to Stryper. Honestly, I never ONCE imagined I’d be reviewing an album on this site that contained a song titled “Big Black Dick” performed by a bearish onstage toilet-sitter in the form of Dodheimsgard collaborator Svein Egil Hatlevic. Wow. There are tweeps! and twoops! with chimes and bells going off in the background/foreground, froglike vocals, gurgling distortion, jarring electronica, and very little conventional rhythm and groove. At first, it seemed as though this album was merely composed of entirely unrelated sound effects haphazardly arranged and spliced together with no cohesive flow in mind, but as subsequent listens reveal, there is actually a roundabout method to this madness. Is it listenable? I guess that depends on your tolerance for unconventional structure, because structure seemed to be an afterthought here. But if listening to the equivalent of a musical kaleidoscope on mescaline is your idea of fun, prepare to stroke yourself to a delirium-induced orgasm of purposeful nonsense.
When it comes right down it, the reason for the scores is because there’s very little actual ‘music’ on Yawn…, as everything is propelled by static, hints of techno-urban trip hop (“Masturbatory Attention Deficit Disorder”) , and many sound effects that sound like someone rhythmically manipulating a videogame. Attempting to establish some sort of individuality among these thirteen tracks is nearly impossible, as this is basically one long exercise in aural unease. This leaves me very confused as to how to describe the quality of this album, since the cohesive strands that tie everything together are so very thin and elusive to identify. Sometimes it reminds me of The Axis Of Perdition, especially with the opening title track, and other times like with “Your System Sucks” and “Sawbeam” there are shades of Nitzer Ebb that bubble to the surface, but overall, Zweizz is totally bizarre and nearly indescribable.
Admittedly, this review isn’t very pictorial and doesn’t paint a graphic vision of the soundscape created here by Zweizz. There are those of you who will take the confusion created by Yawn… as a sign of brilliance that defies genres and eschews macho metal bravado, and in that regard I can respect this album. But in the end, the sparseness of actual music and lack of anything to hold on to will relegate this disc into the ‘once in a great, great, great while’ section of the collections of most readers of this site, staff included I'd venture to guess. I should make it clear I don’t think this album sucks despite the terribly low songwriting score, in fact it’s kind of cool if used only for background noise, and there are genuine moments of intriguing atmosphere here and there. But to be honest, I felt like I needed to take a shower after listening to this half a dozen times in a row, and while sometimes that feeling is appreciated, in this case, it just made me feel dirty and wanting to cleanse myself of the filth, and perhaps that was Zweizz's goal. Only recommended for a very, very limited audience, while I didn't hate this album, its minimalist genius totally escapes me. Take this record, as well as this review, with a massive pinch of salt.
