japanese voyeurs: yolk

They may sound a little like Paramore on paper – pint-sized female rocker fronting an all-male lineup – but Japanese Voyeurs are grimier, noisier and decidedly darker than the polished, saccharine punk of Hayley Williams and co. Their sound is steeped in ’90s grunge, from the Nirvana-like riffs to the KatieJane Garside-evoking kinderwhore vocals of frontwoman Romily Alice, and the band cite inspiration from a host of bands, film directors and authors that artistically shaped that decade. It seems fitting, then, that they recruited GGGarth Richardson (Rage Against The Machine, The Melvins, Jesus Lizard) to produce this searing, nostalgia-inducing debut, which collects together all but one of their handful of previously released tracks and adds a couple of new ones (‘Double Cheese’, ‘Heart Is A Fist’).

Retrograde bands tread a fine line between derivative hero-worship imitation and plucky, revivalist sounds, and Japanese Voyeurs happily fall into the latter category; Yolk should have people headbanging in the same way that Yuck have had everyone dusting off their Pavement t-shirts. It’s not just the heavy riffs, but the art and lyrical motifs of the album’s content that borrow heavily from themes that made Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain’s respective seminal works so startling. ‘Smother Me’ blurs the lines between motherly succor and suffocation in the same way In Utero’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’ turned umbilical chords into nooses, and where Love snarled about poisonous breast milk and the horrors of pregnancy on Pretty On The Inside and Live Through This, Japanese Voyeurs twist the ideas of reproduction and gestation in similar, warped fashion, with eerie foetal scans for cover art and songs filled with references to milk teeth, broken birth waters and breeding.

Alice poses an empowering figure against the sludgy punk noise and fertility themes of Yolk. As the principal songwriter, she’s both brutal and poetic, a little-girl voice projecting a grown-up sensuality from the centre of the distortion-fuelled maelstrom. On ‘Get Hole’, where she cries, “The nights are long, and I am lonely / I want your love but I want it slowly,” she voices an assertive desire, and even ‘Double Cheese’, with its lascivious slacker innuendo and wild-out solo, feels kinky and unabashed, a sweaty, teen hormone fest done grrrl style. There’s an air of angst and darkness, too – lyrics like “I got a head full of holes, like piss in snow” (‘Milk Teeth’) paints the psychosis with aplomb – but it’s a cathartic vitriol open to anyone, rather than anything positioned in response to Alice’s female figurehead. When she talks about wanting to screw someone mean on ‘Dumb’, it’s the shrug of the self-aware masochist rather than any specifically female malady.

The band turn out a deliciously slipshod live rendition of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ which, sadly, doesn’t appear here, but they’ve clearly worked that same primal sexiness through Yolk, from the menacing, full-throttle rush of feedback in ‘Blush’, which recalls Hole’s ‘Loaded’ (“Don’t blush when I rip you open”) to the blistering “It’s always summer” hook of ‘Milk Teeth’. For the most part, Yolk is an album that revels in ear-rupturing volume and delirious, teeth-rattling riffs, but the assault slows down on ‘Feed’, which crosses their staple, low-end distortion with mournful, classical strings and guest vocals from Dinosaur Jr. guitarist J Mascis on a song exploring co-dependent, parasitical love (another Cobain/Love fetish – they both used viruses as metaphor devices). There’s a similar, albeit less successful, change of pace on the morose waltz of ‘Heart Is A Fist’, which feels way too melodramatic against the rest of the album’s frenetic tempos, but it’s the only real dud in an otherwise rewarding, ferocious debut.

[Fiction; July 11, 2011]

Written by: Charlotte Richardson Andrews

Tags: japanese voyeurs, yolk

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