Yahweh - Tug of Love

Yahweh’s first release - performed and recorded solely by Lewis Cook - suffers from that which plagues so many other bedroom performers: the curse of the drum machine. Cook succesfully incorporates a vast array of sounds and instruments – effects-heavy guitars, synths, samples – into his music, all carefully balanced, only for the amateurish drum-machine to thump-thump-thump metronomically all over it. Thankfully it subsides over the course of the record. Tug of Love is split into two halves, the first reflecting Glasgow and the second, the Lowlands town of Moffat. As would be expected, the second half is a sparser affair. Field recordings, samples of scratchy vinyl and delicate piano dominate - with the drum-machine reduced to fragmented but carefully programmed percussion - and are well-suited to the sound of Cook’s restrained Scottish-sprechgesang vocals. Ignoring some of that occasionally incongruent drum programming, Yahweh’s epic, electro-drone-acoustica reveals a real talent. [Stephen Toman]