The Science of Weird
Give me weird. Give me different, give me psychedelic, give me funk, give me horror, give me sexy, but please make it all weird. Growing up I thought everyone’s grass was greener than mine, and the greenest of them all always belonged to the people who were the weirdest. The people who broke conventions and seemingly lived with a freedom I could not fathom. I was raised and socialized as a male in a religion where binary was the only choice. You were either a one or a zero, and there was nothing beyond that. But I owned a television and I lived in New York City, so how was the outside world not expected to seep in? Maybe if I were raised in a secluded place surrounded only by congregants, my rearing would’ve stuck? But not in New York City. New York is where people come because they might not feel like themselves back home. Where you can cram into a rush hour train car with all types of people. How were they going to stop me from seeing the world outside?
Karen Finneyfrock wrote this wonderful book called Starbird Murphy and the World Outside. Starbird is a teenager living in a commune in the woods of Washington State, who leaves that home for the first time at age 16 and goes to Seattle to have her whole world changed. When I read this I understood all the internal seclusion, but had no idea what the actual seclusion was like. Starbird didn’t watch tv or use money or any of the worldly things we engage with on a daily basis. I was taught to be separate but it wasn’t an idea easily enforced. Not when I could see Little Richard or Prince or Grace Jones or George Clinton or David Bowie or Cindy Lauper. Not when a train ride south of 34th street was like stepping into wonderland. I could never be Starbird Murphy because my exit plan was constantly incepted by osmosis through all five senses. It would take me decades to know who I could fully become, and I know I am still becoming them.
The Bowery Poetry Club was my masterclass in weird. Working there back when the club was seven days a week and the vibe was anything we could book, I was surrounded by a cacophony of weird. I was weird already, but the BPC was free and gave zero fucks. There was burlesque, and jazz and rock and metal and magic and Art Stars and puppets and comedy and Giggle Fits and Juggernut and stuff I couldn’t even begin to categorize. The artists were weird, the staff was weird, the locals were weird and I was trying to find my weird, but I knew I loved it all. Even the bits I didn’t understand or care for right away. They showed me something about art and people and in turn I learned things about myself.
Today’s album is weird in all the best ways. I discovered Yves Tumor during lockdown. I had heard the name before but never sat with any of their music. I don’t remember where I first heard the song Kerosene, but it was another instance of, “listen to the song and immediately buy the album”. Heaven to a Tortured Mind was released on April 3rd 2020, but I don’t think I got to it until later in the summer after I stopped drinking and began smoking a lot more. I wrote more about this era in Champions of Chill (4-21-24) and in Summertime and the Records are Easy (5-27-24). Those Sunday mornings were all about taking lavish showers and traipsing around the apartment with a skimpy robe and a spliff in the air. That’s what I feel to this day when I hear that album. 2020 was a hell of a year I would never go back to, but the albums, podcasts, movies and shows that kept me company will always have a special place in my psyche.
Sean Bowie aka Yves Tumor is a musician that makes great weird music and this week’s Sunday Morning Record, Heaven to a Tortured Mind is a weird, funky, psychedelic, “Crazy Sexy Cool” album. It has a flow to it that just sits on your walls and covers everything that surrounds you. It might have some jarring moments, but even those feel to flow with a regular days chaos, and makes them feel as ubiquitous as the smoother moments. For me it’s an album where song titles don’t matter to me because I play press on side A and just let it ride. Like many of the albums I love from this year, this one wasn’t created with a global pandemic in mind, but it arrived right on time. Let’s jump into these songs.
Side A
A1. Gospel for a New Century
This album starts with some epic horn samples with a track that feels like one thing, then another, and then it blends into one. First you get this what feels like an intro to a great beer commercial or a gritty hip hop album, but when the vocals drop you’re transported to groovy funky landscape, and when the first verse ends they just fall into place and create this sound that makes you want to put your hands up in praise. The title is so bold in its promise, but I do think it sticks the landing.
A2. Medicine Burn
Creepy noise rock at its best here. This song is talking about severed heads and 600 teeth. I don’t know what they are getting at, but I don’t care either. I love rocking out to their voice and the distorted synth sounds behind a sick guitar riff. I’m no musician so please excuse me if I’m describing it wrong, but you take a listen and tell me what it sound like. This song belongs in Bjork’s pottery playlist. Picture Bjork’s wet clay hands caressing the blob on the spinning wheel, listening to this song and please write me and tell me what you think the finished product looks like.
A3. Identity Trade
This tune has a great drum, bassline, and organized chaos at it’s core. Ives is a genre blender with great abandon and the results are transporting. It’s a two minute quickie, in and out and onto the smoothest, sexiest song in the album.
A4. Kerosene!
This song reminds me of Red Light Special by TLC, and Darling Nikki by Prince, and floating on very salty water. It’s slow and hard and the voices stretch around the song. This is the type of joint I can listen to on repeat for an hour or so. This feels like an Adult Swim soundscape video. While it was the song that drove me to the album, I didn’t expect it when it came. Yves track placement keeps you moving and guessing and never bored. The rock guitar here is played sexy and loud as a bedtime whine. The whole song is in a deep guttural moan. Here there are R&B and Rock and Funk and Blues elements wrapped in one. It might be mine and your favorite song on here, but it’s not downhill from here. There’s still a lot to explore
A5. Hasdallen Lights
This song feels like a Maxwell tune, from the R&B/Neo Soul vibes to the falsetto (see A Practice of Calm). This side came in all hard and tough and it ends in a smoothed out vibe. It’s another two minute song and this time I want more. It would make for a great score in a film. Something during a serious romance scene or montage. One where faces are serious, the clothes are as silk as the sheets and bodies are glistening under a full moonlight. The internet tells me that the title of the song refers to “unidentified lights which have been observed in a 7.5 mile stretch of the Hessdalen valley in rural central Norway periodically since at least the 1930s”. I wanna go there.
Side B
B1. Romanticist
The second side of the album starts off with tune that blends R&B and what sounds like the darkside of New Jack Swing. It starts off real easy and breaks into that same chaos I’ve been going on about. It seems like a short song at a minute and forty-six seconds…
B2. Dream Palette
But it blends right into this song, which I don’t consider to be a different track at all, but I’m not the artist so who am I to tell you they’re not two separate songs. Also it doesn’t matter because they take all the dope parts of the last one and expand into the song's true potential repeating the electric powerful refrain:
“Floating through what feels like
A declaration of love
Our hearts are in danger
Tell me, is this fundamental love?”
B3. Super Stars
This one starts off feeling like it could be a Silk Sonic song, but quickly feels like the Childish Gambino from Awaken My Love. It’s, bounce-swaying your shoulders with eyes closed, type of music. There goes that sexy guitar again. This has that, Bootsy Collins DNA with a twist of Nile Rogers.
B4. Folie Imposée
When this song starts it feels like it’s gonna sound like The Seed 2.0 by the Roots and Cody Chesnut, but the vocals are harmonic and distant. It creates this otherworldly feeling that kinda confuses your body. You might want to jerk to the beat but the vocals and underlying melody are so calming. I don’t know what’s happening here and I love it.
B5. Strawberry Privilege
This feels like that one Cake song mashed up with Young Folks by Peter Bjorn and John, but not as hyped up as both songs. There are some other harmonic elements to it I really dig, but you have no idea what I had to do to remember the name of Young Folks. There was so much googling. This song is announcing the last spliff before the end of the album. I don’t know what song it is, but once at the Sullivan Room for an Alma party, at the end of the night the DJ played a tune with a voice that said “Last call for alcohol, first call for weed” and that’s exactly how this song hits me.
B6. Asteroid Blues
No Lyrics here, just a funky good time. The bassline drives this one past all these lost samples trying to hitchhike a ride back to space, picking up each one on their way to the mothership. You dig?
B7. A Greater Love
Before we leave we gotta sex it up one more time. This is another bedtime whine and a hell of a way to end an album with the guitar all worked up, hot and bothered, with the drums carrying a beat that is hard to follow but lands right on time. When I get to the end of the album I feel so relaxed and when this song ends I’m just like “say it aint so”.
I love this album so much. I honestly have never heard another Yves Tumor album. I can’t call myself a fan of the musician as much as I’m a massive fan of this album. It takes me so many places and keeps me so chill. It’s not for everyday, but some Sunday mornings it hit so right. I hope you’re grooving out to it right now. A bit of a weirder entry to Sunday Morning Records, but we’ve been together for seventeen weeks now and I think you can handle it. Everyone needs a little weird in their lives.
Thanks for joining me folks. I sincerely hope you enjoyed your weekend and hope you have a great week. See you next time on Sunday Morning Records.