If you listen close, you can hear the sound of angels dying. It’s like a bright spring morning, when the air is thick with impending storm, a sense of violence ringing in every molecule of oxygen and carbon dioxide, rendering the colors hyper-real. The clouds come rolling over the horizon and stretch their shadow across the land like a gangrenous paw. So far away. They seem to be moving in slow motion, yet by the time you realize they are upon you, it’s too late to seek shelter. There is no place to hide.
I drove from the north side of Chicago to Indiana listening to Live During War Crimes #3, my fingers white and bloodless around the steering wheel, my intestines coiled like a python in my abdomen. I felt like I was being passed overhead by some otherworldly beast, some Lovecraftian horror that rent the fabric of space in its wake. It seemed to go on forever. Fifteen minutes into the first track, I became aware of a lazy percussive beat barely audible over the rhythmic squall of electronic noise. Was it there the whole time? After nearly 23 merciless minutes, the storm clouds break up and I’m gasping for air like a drowning man.
That first track, from the band’s final U.S. show in Chicago, is indicative of the album as a whole: fragile melodies that gradually get subsumed in a fog of caustic feedback, such that it’s impossible to tell where Gabriel Salomon’s guitar ends and Pete Swanson’s manipulations begin. Indeed, if I were to lodge one complaint against the record, it’s that, in spite of the spontaneity behind these performances, each set unfolds in a highly uniform manner. Yet there are subtle markers that distinguish one track from the next: Swanson’s barely-audible vocals on track two, the siren wail permeating the wall of noise on track three. At over twenty-five minutes, the final track is the longest, but also the performance that comes closest to matching the intensity of the Chicago set. For two minutes, we are treated to a languorous, repetitive harmonic loop circled by disembodied voices, static hiss, and sounds like scraping metal. From there, the background noise begins to amplify, rattling against the limits of the recording equipment, rising in pitch to become a shriek. Seven minutes in, we could be standing inside of a Jet turbine, yet that simple musical phrase persists in its drowsy iteration. By the end, the melodic elements of the piece are vying tooth and nail with the chaos surrounding them, the grinding feedback, the arrhythmic pulses of bass so deep they are not so much heard as felt, until the harmony itself becomes almost indistinguishable from the rest of the cacophony.
If the pun in the title of Live During War Crimes implies a sense of playfulness, it’s a joke whispered through a death’s head grin. This final installment in Yellow Swans’ live trilogy puts the epitaph on a decade in American history characterized by fear and violence, one in which the true and the beautiful became easily lost amid ideological noise spewing from every media outlet. But even though it’s a new decade and a new administration, the U.S. is still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay could be with us for another year. Yellow Swans have chosen to call it quits, but sadly their timeliness or relevance show no sign of deteriorating any time soon.
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