Screams turn into heavy breathing, those breaths give way to bass and drums, and logic turns into a glorious mayhem on the opening track of Yves Tomore’s new album, Praise the Lord who chews and does not eat. (Or simply, Hot Between Worlds).
This long title offers a taste of the Tumor’s sense of humor, as well as a hint at their ambitions, which, like Matryoshka dolls, nest one inside another. Take the first song, “God Is a Circle,” which begins with the lyrics, “Sometimes, I feel like there are places in my mind that I just can’t go.” Emotions seem to have multiple meanings: a thesis statement and personal challenge, a meditation on boundaries and a determination to break through them.
Along the way, Tumor sings about feeling “like a ghost inside a well,” musing about how he processes learning that “everyone you love loves someone else,” and repeats the phrase, “same old dance.” What you won’t hear in “God is a Circle” is the word “circle,” although you can find God in your mother’s words and perhaps, if you listen closely, in the space between breaths.
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“Everything around us feels unclean,” says the tumor, “my mom said, ‘God sees everything. With relationships and pain.Perhaps that closed loop comes in the irresistible call and response of “Same Old Dance,” which sung by song and crumbles path-exploring value and hurts into a clean vicious circle.
Tumor’s fourth studio album, produced by Noah Goldstein with mixes by Alan Moulder, maintains the adventurous spirit that reinvigorated their 2016 debut, When a man betrays you. But the Sonic Touch Stones were now galaxies away. After that experimental introduction, the tumor released the popup Safe in the hands of love in 2017, and for the brilliant 2020 Heaven for a tortured mind, They layered on full-throated psychedelic rock. 2021 The Close World EP I leaned more towards those voices, now come Praise the Lord who chews and does not eat In a different kind of first – the first merging of sound. Instead of an entirely new direction, it takes the most swing-by moments sky And asymmetric world and mine them for new complexity, like a paper under a microscope revealing bewildering systems of fractals. They’ve tried four albums on pretty much everything at once, and on their latest album, they enjoy the things they do better than anyone else.
This includes an almost infinite capacity for beauty and an uncanny desire to interrupt it. “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood” opens with a guitar riff cut almost immediately by a young boy who says, “Well, if you die, it’s okay, you can just restart.” In this context, it’s both funny and deeply disturbing, a reminder of both death and all the pursuits (like video games) we use to distract ourselves from that inevitability.
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