Damned Yellow Swans - Damned Yellow Swans (Fuck It Tapes CS)

Another day, another Yellow Swans release. At least that's what they tell me because I sure haven't been keeping up - the last Yellow Swans album I heard in its entirety was 2004's "Bring the Neon War Home", and although I did see the much-lauded "Psychic Secession" disc in the used bin of a local record shop, I passed it up for some reason...probably because I already had a fistful of other goods to purchase. Maybe it's the one that got away. For now though I've tuned myself back in to the realm of Pete Swanson and Gabriel Saloman by picking up this value-priced c20 done up right by the Fuck It Tapes label. The words I came across for this release had it pegged as every bit as vicious and delicious the "Damned" prefix would imply (they use a different D-word with every release dontchaknow). I was not let down - this is a pretty aggressive blat from two pretty spacey sounding dudes, at least that's the vibe the Wire peace gave off (and I mean it as a compliment). The tape art as you can see is particularly gruesome in keeping with the spirit of the whole thing, and is that a dab of goat's blood I spy off to the right? Well my head says it's nail polish but my heart won't have any of that noise.
What noise I will have some of, however, is what comes a-rushin' out of the speaker upon playback. Talk about your thick, ominous clouds of heavy dust-n'-smoke...all whirling and billowing and stinging your eyes and flooding your nostrils. The duo rattle out some kind of wretched aggro guitar/electronic thunder, sounding not entirely unlike Campbell Kneale's Black Boned Angel or one of the more drone-metal oriented acts on his Battlecruiser label. Picture some kind of cracked-lip heaving into a thousand ancient and rusted trumpets and now you're dabbling in the right ozone. Somewhere later in the track there's scads of tiny little squiggles popping out and dancing underneath the gathering fog - before too long it escalates into quite the white-hot screaming noise stew. Just the way mom never made it.
The flip is all the more wrecked, a complete sensory overload of crumpled black stasis. Lotsa waves of busted electronics pushed to eleven repeatedly raining down upon your tiny eardrums from the heavens, backed by a sinister freight-train-in-the-distance asteroid-hurtling-towards-earth rumble. Goes down easy for something that's so tough to chew. The coda is the drained/lonesome sound of the planet's apocalyptic groaning, total American Tapes ground zero effect. What's not to like?
This was a pretty good taster for what webs Yellow Swans are spinning as we speak, but like Irmin Schmidt once said, I want more. Unfortunately I don't know where to look - the "Swan News" section of their website is busted! So I'm pretty much clueless. And useless. What're you even doing here anyhow? What am I doing here? Sheesh...