This is Joe K***, roving reporter for the newest addition of the K*** Family Newsletter, Vol. XXXV, Issue 35. Reporting from the field, second story of a three-story Wildwood rental home. Not too much in terms of music news to share with you, at least none that are age-appropriate to this readership of mostly early-middle-aged adults. Best I can give you is that my niece brought with her a singing cactus that alternates between public domain songs like "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" and also a creepy recording of
Uncle Boober mumbling "I'm gonna EAT you." Even a sharp, striking sound like that of Yambag is struggling to cut through the cacophony of the cactus and a toy crab that scuttles around while playing a unknown-time-signatured EDM song and some bullshit about the Olympics on the TV and Nana looking up from reading her Facebook timeline to indicate that she just received a "breaking news bulletin" from an unknown app about a lawyer falling out of an "unbreakable" window which we quickly discovered through a simple google search was an event that occurred in 1993 Toronto.
I'd like to talk today about optimism-ization. My editor is indicating that this word does not exist. I know, because I just made it up. He's saying that it should be "optimization," which is a real word, sure, and yeah, I guess could even apply in this situation, an album review for the 2024 album Mindfuck Ultra. "The action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource." That's not what I'm talking about. But we've made a deal. If I first write about optimization, then he will grant me some space for some optimism-ization discussion as well. Plus, I'm technically on vacation, so my editor can suck a fat one.
Ten minutes is an efficient use of space in these situations, I'd argue. Yambag optimizes their space and plays as fast as they can. Their speed is not a surprise; it is, in fact, baked into the premise. "It must be stopped!" shouts the front cover of the album. Sure, maybe this is the dog character on that cover reading the newspaper about how democracy is dying, and he's saying that the evildoers who are hastening its demise are the ones that must be stopped, but I'm choosing to see if as commentary on the insane tempo at which Yambag plays.
"Ancient Relics" starts the pace, and gives a "woo!" like a clarion call, and then we go into the song proper, which, at least to my ears, speeds up even more? I can't tell if I'm being deceived by the osmium-grade density of the rhythm section or if it actually does speed up, but regardless, we can definitively say that it does NOT slow down. I don't understand anything that's being said throughout the songs. I barely understand anything that's being played. How does the drummer even move that fast? And why? At a certain point, it just feels like you're not even playing a beat anymore, but instead just doing a drum roll but with one stick on the snare and another on the hi-hat.
We must ask ourselves why. It's crucial. If Yambag is purposefully obscuring its message by optimizing this shit so much that it becomes indecipherable, then what does the message become? I assume the message becomes anger, either giving into the anger or harnessing its power to fight back. Speed up the punk music far enough and it just becomes one long scream. Maybe I should ask myself whether if you take any random scream and slowed it down, would it become a democracy-defending hardcore punk song?
If I'm being honest with myself, then I'd say that these are questions that I was not given the opportunity to properly sort through this week. Even this review was written under the assumption that the one-year-old I brought back from the beach would take a nap and then that nap never materialized and so I typed one sentence at a time in between having to keep her from falling off the chairs she keeps climbing on. We were able to listen to Mindfuck Ultra a few times during that brief period of the day, since they optimize better than anyone. Even that last fucking sentence took me about four minutes to write because in between the words "few" and "times," she showed me what she was chewing on, which appeared to be an ancient, calcified piece of pasta that she had found under the couch and had hair and dirt all over it, jesus fucking christ.
So I wait, and now it's the evening time, and all the little kiddies and their dancing cacti are asleep, and I play the album for the adults. Here is where I am about to release my theory of optimismization and put that theory into practice. Here are the rules: everyone gathered around the table has to give at least partial attention to Mindfuck Ultra (a title that I did not say out loud) as it plays out of the portable speakers, and then say one optimistic thing about. Something positive. And it can't be something sarcastic either, nothing like "I'm happy that it ended" or any shit like that. Real optimism. This is optimismization.
Bob, who was the most likely to have something good to say, said "the guitars are cool." I'll take his word for it, even though, to my ears, the guitars are just another illegible function of the noise. It takes a few minutes to parse through the genre discussion that pops up here, as most people assume that this is "Bob's music," which isn't totally false but also not completely on target, since the gap between thrashcore and nü-metal is measurable. (That my dad would, the following day, claim that
fifth-wave emo band Home Is Where also sounded like Yambag proves that the genre discussion is probably gonna fall on deaf ears during a week like this.)
My mom said "the drums," which was probably just a cheap tack-on to Bob's "guitar" comment, and, like, I'm not actually pretending that my mom has any actual thoughts about the drumming on Mindfuck Ultra, but I appreciate the sentiment all the same, since her son was a drummer, and I'd like to think that this was her unconscious default answer after so many years of being supportive of that son, who drummed for a long time, but not very well, and yet still received compliments from his mother, and the compliment here about the drumming must have, in my opinion, been some ancient impulse, bubbling to the surface after many years of being dormant.
Now, as I already stated above, I made sure to indicate that the optimism had to be in good faith, but that didn't stop Jenn from saying "I like that it ends" and leaving it at that. I've always admired that my sister knows what she likes and doesn't like and sticks to her guns. She's a no-bullshit sibling. I don't mind that she doesn't like it. I think there's something to be said about her being married to Bob for all these years now, and tolerating his music too. There is a judgment involved, but the judgment has no bearing on the familial love that she shares. The only tradeoff here is that she doesn't back down after cheating during board game night.
Pam liked the vocals, saying that they were fast but that the voice was not the type of intolerable vocal styling that one might expect from hard-and-fast music like this. No Cookie Monsters or pterodactyls on this thing. It's fun how everyone's brief comments say something about the person who makes them. Pam, being a vocalist who cared and cares about her craft, would be the type of person to scoff at a frontperson whose vocal performance consists mostly of screams. And while you can't really understand what Yambag's Richard Rodriguez is hollering about, you could if you did the work. The words mean something. The vocals convey that message. I don't know, it's a whole thing, but I was proud of Pammy for at least making the distinction.
Dad had to struggle to say something nice, but was true to his word and was optimistic about it, eventually. Said something that tacked on to Pam's comments. But also was pretty humble about his own tastes and interests when it comes to music. He described himself as a "singles listener" as opposed to an "album listener." Infamously, his favorite album of all time is a Rolling Stones Greatest Hits compilation, so he's not lying. And a lot of his question had to do with the difference between an EP and an LP. But still, still, I appreciated that his confusion over the music said something about the experience that we were all going through, sitting around that table. He would never do Record Club in a million years because that's just not how he approaches art. The first episode of The Bear Season 3, a beautiful treatise on love and pain and obsession, was just white noise to him. I don't know why thrashcore wouldn't be the same. It's wise of him to acknowledge that about himself.
Aunt Dee Dee, bless her, had trouble understanding the assignment. Said "I don't like it" but then after optimismization was explained quickly switched it to "I like it." A through line weaved into all of these answers, I think, is the idea that a family member sat everyone down and asked them to say something nice, with an unspoken implication being something along the lines of "hey, this is stupid, but it's important to me, help me out." Dee Dee, despite everything else, answers that call without question. Her oldest nephew wants her to listen to some bullshit thrashcore? She likes it. No further questions.
Nana, who is no stranger to the annual Wildwood album reviews that I put together on this blog every year under vacation duress, rolled out the usual tangent: "My father used to make us listen to music when I was little." I just checked
last year's review, and yeah, I already mentioned this. And that review is linked back to the previous year's, and so on and so on, for as many years as we vacation down the shore together and she says the same thing while we listen to music. She said it about motherfucking Yambag! A taut ten-minute blast of raw power! She immediately transitioned into the anecdote about listening to fucking opera as a kid on Saturday mornings! This can only act as more proof that social media has rotted her brain to the core, completely obliterating any ability to stay on a single thought for more than three seconds before popping off into something else. I've been very vocal this week about how trump poops his pants, so at least we've been spared from the Fox News bullshit out of embarrassment. And yet... she listened to Yambag, and didn't say anything bad about it, and so, I don't know what to say, man. Zoomed out, I appreciate the distraction in the stead of a condemnation, and, through it all, I love my grandmom.
Sophie fell off that chair, by the way. This was three days ago at this point (as always, this review written piecemeal over a series of days). Just fell right the fuck off, did a spectacular flip so that she landed on her back like Mick Foley used to do back in the day, wasn't injured but was upset enough that she finally succumbed to the nap that she had thus far avoided through sheer force. This has nothing to do with Yambag or music or anything like that. The blog was safely away when she fell. I guess I'm just trying to cross Ts and dot Is here. It was a week. We listened to Yambag. There was a lot said about it. I liked it but think that there's more to say about it just out of general principle than out of some deep love and affection for it.
It's something. I don't know what, since all I hear now is the generic sounds of a Kitty Cat Princess app on a tablet and the crunch of Doritos that will eventually end up all over the floor. But were I to hear Yambag here and now, I'd say something else. There's always more to say. There's always room for more optimism. More optimismizing, less optimizing.
This is Joe K***, reporter in the field, signing out till next year. Happy Wild-wild-wildwood Days, everybody.
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
