Record of the Week: Yambag: Mindfuck Ultra LP

Yambag: Mindfuck Ultra 12” (11PM Records) Cleveland’s Yambag returns with another highly pressurized blast of manic, faster-than-fast hardcore. If you’ve seen Yambag live, you’re doubtless already a fan, as they are one of the most explosive live bands in contemporary punk. I can think of few other bands that command a room the way they do, and when I’m watching them play I feel like their music is a massive ocean wave that’s obliterating me physically and psychically. Their records, of which I think Mindfuck Ultra is the best yet, are similarly powerful. With a blisteringly fast sound that lies somewhere between DRI’s Dealing with It and Napalm Death’s From Enslavement to Obliteration, Yambag shows all the budget power violence and fastcore bands how a truly great band deploys the blastbeat. When Yambag is blasting, it feels like you’re being run over by a truck (case in point: the first track, “Ancient Relics”), but there’s just as much thought put into the non-blasting sections, and if you took blast parts out, you’d still have a great (if very short) US-style hardcore record. And while all the parts work in and of themselves, when Yambag constructs one of their Rube Goldberg machines of whiplash tempo changes (like on “Huff N Puff”), the effect is singular and outstanding. While so much contemporary hardcore feels trapped in a prison of context where you really need to understand the band’s influences and where they’re coming from socially, aesthetically, and politically in order to appreciate them, Yambag delivers visceral gut-punch hardcore punk that makes it feel like you’re hearing this music for the first time.