Yellow Swans - Drowner

Double LP Reissue, limited to 500 copies.

The Yellow Swans archive machine kicks in another gear with this first time vinyl pressing of a collection first released to cassette in 2007 in a near-imperceptible edition of 60. Cassettes and CD-rs are the currency of the noise underground for good reason, but bloody hell, this is music so cacophonously momentous you could erect a church inside of it, so why limit the audience to 60? Yellow Swans' universe is dense and foreboding at the best of times, though there's something especially suffocating about Drowner (the clue's in the title), an at first unrelenting wash of hardcore aggression, industrial grit and shoegaze expanse, a slow-drifting iceberg of sheet metal. And yet... The thing with Yellow Swans, though, is that they've a tendency to disguise moments of beauty & light within the punishing squall - let's call them revelations earned amidst their noise crucible. Here, it's the centre point of 'Second Drowner' and 'Isolation Tank' that provide the relative (all things considered) peace, some kinda absolution born of the unholy communion of Earth, MBV and their Gira-fronted partial namesakes. Drowner is a grey-scale noise prism heavy in all the meaningful ways, adhering to no orthodoxy but its own, and a work of real transcendance.