Your Black Star, Beasts

A band’s physical album is often an exercise in the art of presentation. Even major label releases with all the money of Midas behind them are often bargain-basement CD cases and booklets little removed from the practical paper sleeve. Why waste money on pictures and lyrics, right?

Emptiness can also be an artistic medium, however, and as such the cover of Your Black Star’s third album, Beasts, tremendously excited me. Solid black, the album’s only front decoration is a Rorschach image seemingly captured with primitive Xerox technology. I’ve taken to staring at it endlessly as their hateful, hard, and hurting music makes me wish that I had invested in better computer speakers before embarking on a career as a music reviewer. You turn it one way, and man screams angrily to the left, while another perspective yields an almost empty skyline.

I can’t imagine a better stage for the six songs that comprise Beasts. The album pulses with a dark, raging energy that calls The Jesus and Mary Chain or Peter Murphy to mind. The influence of the ex-Bauhuas singer is particularly apparent in Jeremy Johnson’s powerful, sinister tenor. It’s a voice that never stumbles or trips, leaping with sure confidence over the free-form poetry of the album’s drum-heavy opener “Fight.” That’s not to say that “Fight” or any other track on the album is some overly emotional art-school exercise in gentle wordsmithing. The music throughout the entire opus is angry just shy of shouting, preferring the zeal of a psychotic to the wailing of an angry drunk. Controlled chaos, much like the fury of The Cult, is the order of the day.

The helpful (if unnecessarily rhyming) press release accompanying Beasts makes the claim that this album was an attempt to eschew the blatant over-production of modern mainstream music and instead go for something raw and mean. Your Black Star’s experiment can be called a success, and I feel sorry for anyone turned off by the visceral quality of the recording. Sure, it’s not a pretty painting (it’s a Xerox, remember?), but you sacrifice feeling like you’re listening to a commercial jingle for the unbearable ecstasy of actually being inside the artist’s vision. Granted, that vision is dark and often violent.

“Set the Trap,” for one, is frankly unsettling, reminding me of nothing so much as a credit song for the latest installment in the Saw franchise. Still, the album is called Beasts for a reason, and so much of the music reflects the animal mindset. The wild spirit is never absent, and a desire to roam free, to hunt, to love, to kill, and to die any way but while running away is howled by every song.

If I was held down and forced with a pair of pliers to choose a hit single from the disc, I’d certainly suggest “The Break” or perhaps “Little Storm.” Both are the most evolved Pokemon versions of the selections. But as far as I’m concerned, Beasts is a six-sided animal, and every side has teeth. Play it frontways, backways, or randomly on shuffle — it doesn’t matter. You’re going to get bit.