Heaven To a Tortured Mind
The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.
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.
Yves Tumor takes things to an unabashed glam-pop extreme on Heaven To A Tortured Mind
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The barriers between real life and science fiction, between tangibility and abstraction, have rarely felt more frail. There's a disorienting...
In the face of information overload, Yves Tumor remains one of music’s last true enigmas.
Do you remember when rock music was cool? Not in that aloof bookish way we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years, but in the strutting cocksure sense of the so-called rock gods of old.
There is always more to Yves Tumor than meets the eye. On his fifth studio album ‘Heaven To A Tortured Mind’, the earlier avant-garde
This is another triumphant, multifaceted and unpredictable record from the shapeshifting American artist, and as exciting as anything he's ever done
When you consider the idea of linear artistic development, you very rarely find a musician moving from idiosyncratic noise artist to more conventional rock...
Heaven To A Tortured Mind by Yves Tumor, album review by Leslie Chu. The full-length is available today via Warp Records and DSPs
Sean Bowie’s creative imagination is extraordinary: experimental, capable of any genre, with an internal logic powering its shifts in mood