Yves Tumor - Heaven to a Tortured Mind

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Heaven To A Tortured Mind, Yves Tumor's new album released on Warp, is made up of 12 precisely crafted songs. "Gospel For A New Century," the lead single..

Pitchfork 85

The iconoclastic artist moves to a plush and magisterial kind of rock music for a gratifying and intense record, one whose pleasures are viscerally immediate.

The Guardian 80

(Warp)
Sean Bowie’s creative imagination is extraordinary: experimental, capable of any genre, with an internal logic powering its shifts in mood

The opening track on Sean Bowie’s fourth album under the name Yves Tumor has a bold, swaggering title – Gospel for a New Century – and a sound to match. It struts along on a tight, funky rhythm, punctuated by explosions of dramatic blaxploitation-soundtrack brass swiped from a 1978 pop-funk album by South Korean vocalist Lee Son Ga. There’s a weirdness to the whole enterprise – something chaotic and edgy about the atmosphere, and somewhere in the distance there are faintly disturbing cut-up female vocals – but you don’t notice it unless you concentrate. Certainly you don’t notice it as much as the impassioned vocal, the lyrics about sexual desire and unrequited love, and the killer chorus.

It sounds like the track of a leftfield artist marshalling themselves to make something more straightforward and commercial – which fits with the person behind it. The first album by Yves Tumor (who uses they/them pronouns), When Man Fails You, which they self-released in 2015, was way out in the leftfield: a collection of dark ambient instrumentals, bursts of noise and unsettling field recordings. Each of their acclaimed subsequent releases seems to have edged at least a little closer to the mainstream, but never as stridently as this.