I was playing video games with a sick six-year-old on Sunday (time stamp: 4/22). Then we watched a baseball game (Phillies won, completing a 4-game sweep of the Pirates). Had some dinner. Couple of craft brews. Season premiere of Westworld! All in all a pretty satisfying day.
Yves Malone may have done some (or all) (or none) of those things, but he did one unexpected thing to top it all off, one that’s got me quivering with silliness at its prospect, got me ticking that last box on my “best day ever” checklist that I keep hanging on the refrigerator, just in case. That’s right, Yves Malone dropped a new surprise album on Sunday, Beyond the Before, and I got to hear it!
Don’t worry, you can too — you don’t even have to go very far beyond this page to stream it, because I’ve embedded it below, I’m just that thoughtful. (However, buying it will have to be done somewhere else. Like the Bandcamp page yonder stream takes you to if you click on the right spot.)
As is characteristic of an Yves Malone release, the maestro drops you into a demented synthwave landscape that’s right out of a Cronenberg or Carpenter film (or maybe Tron, depending on what you’re tripping on when you shut your eyes). This one’s got some real time-/reality-shifting going on though, and nothing is as it seems, and parallel universes collide and expand and superimpose themselves upon one another.
(Thinking of VALIS here a little bit, I’m not gonna lie. It’s that cover art — one small, insignificant person experiencing the collision of two realities.)
And Beyond the Before’s got it all, the slow burns, the pulsating workouts, the psychedelic free-for-alls. Everything you could possibly want in an Yves Malone record. It sounds like a 1980s movie, looks like a 1970s sci-fi paperback, and feels timeless. Maybe that’s because time is stopped, or you’re outside of time, or you’ve played this on repeat for years in a row and haven’t realized it and now you’re old and everyone you’ve ever loved is dead.
How’s THAT for a Sunday-afternoon epiphany!
More about: Yves Malone
