YHWH Nailgun: “Sickle Walk”

Used to be when someone said “math rock” or “noise,” you had an idea of what you were in for. Not anymore. Take YHWH Nailgun, who for all I know, are actively courting these labels, yet like so many current lower-case-P progressive bands, have as little to do with Lightning Bolt as My Chemical Romance has to do with Rites of Spring. Nor can they be said to recall any other recent, totally out-there bands. So don’t be misled; you haven’t heard a band like this yet. And they’ve got their sound boiled down to a syrup on their latest single, “Sickle Walk”:

• Saguiv Rosenstock mutes every attack on his guitar with a volume pedal. He plays with the same footwork as a piano player, yet for all the notes he’s playing, the effect is of playing a synth with one finger. Only thing remotely like this I can think of is the first three seconds of the solo to “Venus” (by Television). Contrast: Rosenstock plays this way on like, half of YHWH Nailgun’s songs.

• Jack Tobias (synth) apparently makes a point of playing half as many notes as Rosenstock, at half the speed. His sound design is more in line with hyper pop than indie rock.

• Zack Borzone’s vocals, one imagines, are gonna be the dealbreaker for most listeners. In spite of a kind of two-toned strain-to-bark range, he delivers on musicality, as opposed to say, your Brian Chippendale’s or your Al Johnson’s. I was won over after two listens.

• Sam Pickard, who also drums in Godcaster, is the “lead guitarist” of the band, the busiest and the most lyrical. “Sickle Walk” is the only single off their next album, 45 Pounds, that isn’t a billion percent pitched percussion (when’s the last time that happened?) but he still wrings as much tone from his kit as Rosenstock from his guitar.

Now consider how cannily YHWH Nailgun package their material. Every song they’ve put out since their first EP adheres to a strict ultra-minimalism: 4x Riff A, 4x Riff B, etc. But as opposed to every other punk band doing it out of laziness, YHWH Nailgun’s militance is in service to clarity. Riffs this abstract could easily fatigue in a proggier form, even if it appealed to the pleasure-calorie counters.

For my money, “Sickle Walk” could have used a less tripped-on-the-plug ending. But I can’t say it fucks up the potency. Did I mention these songs are catchy in a way that elaborates on what “catchy” means? You can see why it turns my crank—let’s see if we get another band this decade whose every member has developed as distinctive an approach to their instrument as YHWH Nailgun.

Stream, share, buy to your heart’s content.

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