PoiL Ueda - Yoshitsune

A Closer Listen

After sending a tremor through the prog-rock world earlier in the year, PoiL Ueda return with a surprising sequel to their powerfully theatrical montage of the Heike monogatari, an epic from around the 13th century that was foundational to early modern literature from Japan. Where the first album began with a prayer and dived straight into the mass suffering of the battle of Dan-no-ura in the 12th century, Yoshitsune dwells upon the titular character, a samurai warrior and general of keen military skill, the great victor of said battle. The prayer’s promise of permanent transformation reaches its highest point in Yoshitsune’s story, as his victor’s glory and prestige are stripped by false accusations of treachery made by his own brother, the better political strategist and a classic manipulator. His tragedy is both an inevitability and an inspiration, a heroic tale of grand inner violence.

The band follows through the aggression with which the first album ended, but with a different approach, no longer primarily propulsive. Rather, the pace is slower, Ueda’s voice less of a belligerent groan and more of a threatening lament, with PoiL’s brashly disruptive instrumentation pared down into a perfect sort of disruption, contemplative and precise. This time around, their voices join the fray, a chorus of ghosts whose haunting song teems with histories of death and betrayal. Organized by “scenes”, Yoshitsune flows from one grueling track to another no longer as a world-significant concert of tragedies, but as the unbearable struggle of a single person against an unrewarding, amoral universe. As PoiL Ueda mapped the ravages of war across an entire land, so does the sequel articulate a mental, emotional geography in which the individual protagonist overcomes a series of roadblocks that solely signal further suffering. The fierce controlled chaos of the first scenes eventually gives way to the fascinating “Ataka”, in which Ueda displays her range as a soloist, a beautifully tortured track describing how far Yoshitsune has fallen, his skills and status useless before a humbling fate.

The final scene, “Kokô”, is most similar to the first album’s explosive sets of energy, but after having traveled through Yoshitsune’s path of inner strife, it is easier to perceive how the band ceaselessly shifts between sadness and dramatic violence, filling the compositions with small details for us to follow the protagonist’s broken mind. As the curtain lifts, the music leaves us with an unresolved horizon, a segue into electronic drone. But the Heike epic is meant to be performed time and again, a ritual to give consistency to the raw material of history; it draws out the question of listening to it all over again, of reliving the harsh Rock-in-Opposition edges of its harmonies, of being enthralled by Ueda’s vocal power for a third, fourth, tenth time, and knowing that this raw material consists of our experiences of the world. As horror envelops the planet in myriad ways, albums like PoiL Ueda and Yoshitsune remind us that this is what it means to persevere – an endless transformation of sufferings. Taken as a diptych, these albums cut across each other as beginnings and endings, even as complements, forming instead a cycle of violence that maps individual and collective struggles as rivers that flow into each other. Give in, give up, go further, start again. (David Murrieta Flores)