By Kieran Press-Reynolds
Yves Tumor has been primed for a big release for a while, and Safe in the Hands of Love delivers.
It’s an explosion of energy, curls of color transmitted through intoxicating percussion loops, heartrending soul ballads and blaring noise, all structured within his most accessible and conceptual exoskeleton yet.
The Warp Records affiliate is known for his experimental style. His latest releases, Experiencing the Deposit of Faith (2017) and Serpent Music (2016) were pan-genre collages that drew from elements of ambient, electronic, hip hop, pop, psychedelic and noise music.
While Safe does follow that trend to some extent, each track is more purposeful. The album is an exploration of the human soul, stripping identity down to its most basic attributes: love and loss.
The instrumental tracks are among his best ever. “Faith in Nothing Except in Salvation” opens the album with what feels like a person ripping the soul out of themselves.
It’s nothing but a funk loop, time-slowed and layered with a long decay that provides a torturous, crawling intensity. “Economy of Freedom” is ethereal, with an ambient glitch beat supported by echoing vocal chops and slow effect splices.
It sounds like what it would feel like to wander around an alien dimension, everything around you inherently threatening yet intriguing.
Yves Tumor’s biggest progression is not with the instrumentals but with the tracks that introduce vocals.
Safe is his first project grounded in his own voice, and he uses it in a myriad of interesting ways to add levels of depth to songs.
“Hope in Suffering (Escaping Oblivion & Overcoming Powerlessness)” combines static noise patterns with eerie percussion loops and gunshot pitter-patter to create an atmosphere of deafening misery.
The instrumental is coupled with a poetry performance that further rattles, a voice chanting into the void for any ounce of humanity it can find: “Castrate my skin / Breathe my former thunder that rules the day / Bring that tide in and rule from his grave / And rule that image / Scrape that image.”
The track is especially unnerving because of the way Tumor controls his voice. The poetry is delivered in a robotic pitch, which makes me think that despite all the human pretensions, his powerful cries about achieving selfhood are only an illusion.
(Or, he finds his home in homelessness and the deconstruction of his humanity, which is an even scarier thought.)
“Recognizing the Enemy” features Tumor in a similarly vulnerable state, pleading to his own soul with lines like “I look so different / Inside my own living hell / It means so much to me / When I can’t recognize myself”.
Tumor’s words lay his id bare, and as he howls into the abyss, it feels so much like we’re there with him, either as a participant or an onlooker.
His voice drips with zombie-like longing, a too far gone salivation for identity and humanity, like if Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver were self-conscious.
Alongside his most emotionally conflicted tracks to date are also his most enthusiastically euphoric. Songs like “Noid” and “All the Love We Have Now” are passionate, pop-inflected thrill rides.
The former features beautiful Britpop-inspired synthlines that undulate between Tumor’s fantastic vocal outbursts.
It’s a song that, while still emotionally conflicted — “I’m not part of the killing spree / A symptom, born loser, statistic” — rings with absolute power, a declaration of confusion that is overwhelmingly proud.
On “All the Love,” Tumor whispers about love over a similarly jubilant dance beat. Both tracks feel immensely nostalgic.
Tumor’s expressive vocals and retro-futurist production combine to create this wonderful aged atmosphere full of longing for the past and the want to surround yourself with the people you love.
One great track that doesn’t fit neatly into any box is “Licking an Orchid,” which really shows Tumor coming into his own.
He meshes indie rock vibes with catchy lyrics and, in a fantastic second-half turn, a short segment of beautiful melodic noise.
Another song, “Honesty,” draws from techno, combining warm pads and gliding, mechanical synths with overtly human, poppy vocals to give the song a fresh “half-alive” feel that is consistently present as a motif throughout the album.
It’s tracks like these that signify just how far Tumor has come since his previous LPs. “Licking” and “Honesty” exhibit his ability to harmonize all these disparate genres into composite pieces that radiate with honest, emotional exuberance.
Safe in the Hands of Love is the type of album that makes you yearn for more.
It’s a wildly enjoyable journey that is at once meditative, both redolent of the past and of the present, a space where our dreams and nightmares can fuse into one hazy fantasy.
