After
The Feeling
introduced a wider audience to their high-concept collage punk,
Naomi Punk
spent their next two albums tweaking its scale: They tightened and sharpened it on
Television Man
, transforming it into modular anti-pop, but on
Yellow
they try something more radical -- which is saying something, since their music often feels like a direct challenge to the status quo. They embrace the indulgence of the double-album format, exploding their high-concept sounds and strewing them across 74 minutes and two personas,
and their alter-ego the Scorpions. As they incorporate found sounds, library music, and calls to smash the system into
's expanse, they make some of the most challenging music of their career. The band begin the album with not one but two disorienting introductions, one of which prominently features bass (an instrument they don't normally use), while the claustrophobic "Chains" was one of the album's singles. Throughout
,
forces listeners to take the album at its own speed, and the deliberate pace of tracks like "Motorcade" suggests each song is a hard-won battle. Elsewhere, they juxtapose choppy with flowing, and pretty with ugly, in ways that feel like odd mutations: Oil slick guitars coat "Thru the Trees" without ever actually coalescing, and "Chernobyl Carrot" is fittingly warped and jumbled. The feeling that a polluted Earth is ready to take its revenge on humanity permeates songs as diverse as "My Shadow," which buries funky '80s pop under several tons of sludge, and the coded disaffection of "Yellow Cone Hat," where a mudslide that covers the freeway is just one of its unnatural disasters. Despite the emphasis on murky repetition that makes
feel more like an extended meditation than a collection of songs (when
Travis Coster
sings "change my frame of mind" on "Chapter II," it sounds alternately like a wish, a command, and a mantra), it's undeniable that the clearest-sounding tracks are the most accessible; named after emblems of consumption and packaging, "Cookie" and "Cardboard" are even nimbler than
's prototypes.
's best moments may be even more dynamic than those of its predecessor, particularly on the glowering "Perfect" and "Journey to the Top"'s whispery menace and jackhammer guitars. And even though the Scorpions have the last word with "Scorpion Theme," its mix of lunging riffs and rain feel quintessentially
. ~ Heather Phares