Can Kicker: Yew – Interview & Review

Публикация в группе: Осторожный оптимизм

Can Kicker Yew Album Artwork Can Kicker: Yew

Self-released

Out January 23

Undefeated. Miserable. A warrior without tongue. Wolfpack bored of blood. Out of the shadows. Something grows around the creature within the deep terror of this tree hollow: thickly encased in layers of what has been endured, ready to be swallowed, before emerging entirely enlightened, scars still underneath, but the enlarged panorama from where it stands is immensely empowering. Because love fails to lose itself in the throng of the maelstrom. The second album from Cardiff’s Can Kicker, Yew, likes to remind us how and why. Interview and review with Luke P. by Ryan Walker.

What gets up here, stretches, and spits out the taste of a restless night, lights a shakingly rolled cigarette, and stubs it out with a trainer lacking any soles? What was deemed punishable enough to persist with breaking through, with belonging to no one? Just what grows here?

Against the indignity of nature, but also absorbed by its impossible-to-ignore plights and occasional glimmers of acceptance – a final feat appeased by succumbing to contradiction and claiming it as our own, cradled by it, crushed by it: innocence grows here. Its epitaph is the same slate that fronts this very album. The slate is a statement. The slate is a space. The slate is a sword. A child grows here, too. As well as dies. Along with innocence. Trauma bleeds its way back to the fateful steps from which the seed was sown: ”This is to be the place of your birth. Shut up. Yet never be silenced. Get on with it.” The instinctual twitch cuts flesh to ribbons. The outline of a faded projection still smoulders in a shape our scars run far too thick to conceal with any cognitive tricks, bandage wraps or recreational addictions. Scars help us stand on our own two feet.

A plea for elsewhere. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. Other than where it currently sits but retains enough dignity to not come across as some whiney, adolescent racket or desperate, existentially-intimidated diary entry, Yew is an immense razor of claustrophobic beauty: the bitter pill and the beautiful view – the former to convince us down here ain’t half bad despite forced daily to gaze into the imposing monument the latter stands as. There’s so much more substance for us to sink into, even more so when it glares at us like dog eyes in the dark, about to snap.

The old skin is shed, and something else hatches from its back. It might be a new self, a new set of circumstances, a new view looming ahead: transition. Or is it about accepting the inevitability that all things in life are built with duality: as much as the balance between love and hate, darkness and light, hiding and finding a way forward? ”Both probably,” says singer Luke. ”We’re going somewhere – not sure where exactly, hopefully somewhere better eventually. But yeah, we’re only doing it through dualities and contradictions. Feeling our way in the darkness. I think we’re really going to need each other over the next years, reestablishing human-to-human interactions, away from the platforms and all the other shit which seems to get in the way. Building a new world, better together than alone.”

The album came about when Luke began to pen some tunes in the summer of 2021/22. ”In terms of how it came about, I just write songs and bring them to practice,” he states, and symbolically, with the winter recordings taking place in ‘23 by their friend Alice Low in Bristol, in the same studio as their first album was one in now but unfortunately flattened and unveiled into a complex of luxury accommodations (the fate of many studios, art and workspaces across the country), this album mirrors that mood – things knocked down, but the resilience of the artistic underground remains confident enough to carve a way through the crap. ”When we’re there we just mess about and everyone starts writing their own parts, or sometimes parts are written somewhat collaboratively. Once it’s looking like we’ve got enough tunes for an album we just go into the studio again.”

Opener Child channels all of that rage into a six-minute goth storm. The ”human to human” exchanges exist within ourselves. Make peace with the inner enemy and the world will redesign itself accordingly. A world of ‘dry grass ready to burn’, a world within which folks are witnessed ‘holding onto the ideal’ as we, shadows of our former selves, return to the swamp that spat us, ‘sharing a room, with a frightened child’ Luke sings over the same brooding chug, the same spool of caustic chords spiral and whirl like fragments in the dark corner of that very room. It’s a mutilated sonic dirge ripping through the night like a lake of motor oil. Urban, asphalt ambience. Forwards. Faster, Cariad (Welsh for ‘love’ or ‘affection’) beats a mean beat: vocals gasping for air the more they gorge in the mic – a shit mic, the only mic in sight. Repetition unleashed is one hell of a vengeful weapon. It crashes and glides with rhythmic intensity. The title track boils up and bounces with chaotic charm and drama, almost levitating the more it vibrates with the rush of unsettling drones, scorching penetration and fervent telepathy.

Out from the weeds, out from the winds, Yew is a record resplendent with magic and light, prayer and action, oblivion and fear. It swings from the hinges of transition, contradiction coursing through its veins like an electrical current of ungodly turbulence and direct voltage that could power up a telecommunications site and broadcast the life endured, the experiences absorbed, the torturous images harboured across distant lands. An album of love’s desperate mask. An album of hate’s favourite knuckleduster (and vice versa). This is the long-form follow-up to the self-titled album from 2022, but the writing process has been anything but stagnant, and whatever has changed, whatever may have been endured, has been embraced by the band in a way that weaves, pins and uppercuts its auratic impact throughout the record in a way which is concurrently frenzied, yet sensitive. ”It’s hard to say, as the writing process did not really stop’’ explains Luke. ”Right after we recorded Can Kicker, probably before even, I was writing this record. A lot happened during that time of writing the two records – some really good stuff but also a lot of really hard stuff. I think there’s probably more good stuff in Yew.”

Although recorded in Bristol, which seeped into the psyche of the band, back in Cardiff where this was written, a great wave of turbulence was endured that forced the bones of the songs to solidify themselves into some sort of sanctum, an aural architecture away from the volatility of the world around him. Safety in songs. Yeah, there was turbulence in my life for sure,’’ he confirms. ”I was moving around a lot, partly in different places in Cardiff, partly in a caravan by the woods near Penallt and a short stint in Vancouver. It was a time of massive highs and lows. I think most of my writing is some kind of world-building to either escape or understand.”

What of the struggle that necessitates a fantasy with enough fortitude to protect the self from further spouts of damage? Is this inner struggle retaliating against something else on the inside, or does it prepare to go to war with external entrapments and evils? Similar to the purity of the record as being an honest portrait of a moment as it unfolds, ”being a human or just feeling in this fucked up world” issues a similar state of purity: purity poisoned enough to spew itself up into something new, expelling the hot toxins from the stream. ”I think I tend to focus more on the internal or the sort of states of mind our current situation can get us wrapped up in,” Luke states. ”Alienation, disconnection, and so on. But also the opposites – I think this record focuses more on love and connection than our first.”

With Yew, rather than the band setting their sights for any obvious adjustments or motivational intentions this time around – some plotted ambition that wanted to be accomplished, a paradigm to make sure the record has no choice except to be what that initial vision entailed, the record is one of purity. ”I think the intention has always been just to be ourselves and make music authentic to us. That sounds cliché but hey,” Luke confirms.

But not wanting to make it sound like nothing has changed, for musically, things are shrouded in more murkiness, grabs of sounds splitting apart, feedback from blacksmith yards colliding through the soupy din, ultimately diving directly into one’s core the more there is to wade through like a river of set honey or wet concrete, whether or not we’re alone, whether or not we’re after lost. ”Looking back, it feels this time we moved a bit away from the punk side of things, to explore other areas more. We listened to Songs of Praise by African Head Charge every day before recording” he adds.

Indeed- a dub version of the tracks would be a very interesting companion piece. All snatches of broadcasts from the past or present to make us think about the future. A mumble and a pulse. One of the soundscapes and sandbag drums echoing into the wilderness from whence they came. One of the occasional scraping chains of a guitar dipping in and out of focus. Yet, the leftovers of Look Yourself – a stabbing dance of deformed joint chords, basement dust hissing under the feet of something unnerving unloading as touches of rumble and rasp hang in the air heavier than the ease at which its various limbs twitch with intimate, airless eccentricity are pulled out of it. It moves in jerks. A bleak, dystopian dub disco climax, both sucked through and spat outwards from – a no man’s land.

But such eerie spells of ambience, offset and intensified by taut flames, chants of fearless lamentation and abrupt interruptions of primitive rhythms that cyclically underpin the whole movement are certainly ambitious enough to keep things experimental and embellished with enough intrigue to satisfy some kind of experimental itch. Something summoned up from hazy, dub-encrusted bunkers. A bootleg from belowground. A recorder concealed in the back pocket of a pair of old jeans. A wall away from contact. A series of tracks tucked away on a rare cassette tape.

Starting in 2020 after Luke had wanted to write and sing in a punk group for some time, but ”not overly bound by genre,” the initial vision for the group was, whilst oscillating from, and skirting between a love of folk, country, experimental music as well as references to post-punk and anarcho subcultures, to approximately hybridize Crisis, Neil Young and Rikk Agnew. Whether that’s what he got, or whether that’s what people consider this album to be, is inconsequential. Through friends, Short and Jo remain in the group, with Danny climbing aboard a little later after Emma departed for London. With a practice just a fortnight before the first lockdown hit- the band have come a long way.

Somewhere between Wire and UK Decay, somewhere between Bad Breeding and the Banshees, somewhere between the Cure and Conflict featured on a Bullshit Detector compilation, Becoming surges a bestial, brooding torrent. All palpitating bass drum kicking from its pit, all splintered guitars with reels of concertina razor wire crawling out the corners of its mouth in a riot of noise that peels the rot of all walls, all crucified vocal holler, as a stranger from the unconsciousness of the astral grime emerges to recite the war-torn folklore to whoever will listen, sat around the spirit’s last flickering campfires on the other side as the lingering stench of blood-stained shrapnel fizzes and glistens in a heap of insurmountable, machine riffage. ”In the studio, I think we tried to get the recording a bit more settled and less mad than our previous efforts,” Luke remembers. ”We always record live, so this was primarily just isolating the amp for the lead guitar in a vocal booth. Occasionally Short opened the booth while we were recording for feedback.”

But don’t be deceived by the idea of ”more settled” or ”less mad.” Refuse To See unveils the view behind the smokescreen. A swarm of folks who fell through their own reflections. Found years later in a place where below city, below feet, below trees, below consciousness: another world must be suitably ignored before the whole motion picture replays itself again, just as clearly as it was the first thousand runs, but we remain ”just as blinded as before.” Drums ruining themselves, running out of space, so decide to create more by eating through every surface in sight as whisperings of feral guitars like a feral scratch through to the surface. Wrapped up in internal suffering and self-compassion, opposed to external repression and outward resistance, its amphetamine-inhaling comrade explodes on It’s Not Going Away, a blitzkrieg of disjointed punk mania. Moodier things abound in Half Asleep Half Awake that perfectly the album’s spirit is ensnared by the very phrase caught between sentience, and slumber: paralysis. It shatters with every skull-splitting cymbal bleed, bass kick and guitar scrape that breaks into fragments, chiming against the cages of industrial wreckage that sees reality, a replica of a lie long told to the point that it is widely accepted as an inscrutable, ideological axle shaking in the rain, ringing the bell, with nobody home to answer. Yet, ”have we ceased to care?” it questions.

Can Kicker by the band's own Danny ©

Here’s a record simmering, and shimmering with texture – hard to trace, distorted yet always succeeds in directly dropping itself between the eyeballs, thudding through the heart, breaking through its sound barrier. It conjures things up and crashes in with some dark, magic power – raw, but full-bodied and ominous, and therefore – a lineage between the impenetrable, unprecedented indentation of their beloved DIY collectives – formed to quash the boredom, to break the spell – and in a crackle of vinyl static, disband before the instant gives up. The vibe in Bristol, that unpolished chaos, that naked detail was perfect to create Yew as it lives and breathes here. ”The vibe?” queries Luke. ”There was this sort of frightening tunnel near the studio full of junk, buddleia and shit like that. I remember we were walking in and out of it a lot to get booze or other essentials. I think after setting up the mics we went out for a bit and then recorded pretty much the whole record in an hour or two on one night.”

Although, with a penchant for capturing as honest a picture of the band as possible, some experimentation, some slowness, creeps into the ethers. Through the tunnel, traversing all the horrors on the various stalls and shutters that populate this path, from the sodium glow of the convenience store to the studio, Capacity bursts apart as a critical example of how vocals can cut across like a one-way conversation with nothing except the bare-naked walls they (band/he/Luke) is encased in. Numbed by despondency. Exhausted. Gone. Incommunicative yet on the cusp of combustion. Closer to a penultimate crysallis. An example of how the band can interlock and groove and entice each other’s presence into a psychic craze without losing the impetus of what makes rock hauntingly dark, maddeningly hypnotic and beguilingly menacing. It yawns in chains. It breaks loose.

Adorning the album’s cover is a piece of slate. With font and stonework by Morgan Owain Edwards and photograph by Leuan Morris, there’s a sense of the album’s psychic component as possessing an immense weight – physically rooted and rotten somewhere but, despite one’s best efforts, can’t be removed from the spot: the idea of slate and uncarved blocks, the idea of a tree, the idea of a burial mound deep in the woods, hysterically zigzagging across common land, the idea of crevices throughout new worlds, fields and mounds and ”crows, rivers, urban decay and love” that also pours out from the rolling vistas as noted in Cariad’s earlier ”ancient land aligned with the sun”. Unsure of where we are. Unsure if we’ve been here before. Unsure if anything has changed. But this is more than just an idea. For Can Kicker, the idea of a slate is more akin to a state of mind. ”One of despair, one of the heightened contradictions and tensions we exist in,” Luke explains. ”But also, of the escape or the healing qualities of nature, of human connection and love.”

Although produced in Bristol, Wales seeps into the subconscious watering holes of the band as a space to hold close or push away from view. Or fuck the subconscious geographies that so vehemently infect our decisions with their tentacles and roots and ghostly, lonely neon murmurings. Wales unleashes itself in a more linguistic, violently impassioned manner. A landscape influence. The slate – a dark storm or a surface upon which to etch our fondest desires and deepest ambition, abounds in potency. ”It’s funny this as it has not felt like a conscious influence. That may sound odd considering the slate and everything. I think nature is a conscious influence, however. But of course, it’s where we live, it’s our home,” Luke says. ”And it’s where many of those who worked on the record are either from or reside. One lovely story is the artwork. Morgan who now lives in Copenhagen, bought the slates he later etched for the artwork with him from where he’s from in Corris. Ieuan who photographed them is also from Corris. Two artists who previously didn’t know each other, generations apart from the same village, working on the same small punk record. learning Welsh I wanted to start to use it in Can Kicker, even just a small amount. But I don’t think the record is about Wales necessarily. There’s no doubt our surroundings have influenced us though. It’s just natural I suppose.”

A child is born again. Taller. Stronger. Harnesses the sick heave of the streets that surround it. The features of its reflection are distinctly chiselled, challenged and stretched. The storm of the war outside must be braved. Love is corrupted. Crying out for help. To be cleansed and replenished by melody. The soul is a spent force. A street worker trying to make ends meet. Terrified of nature. Friends abandoned. Old bodies buried by new ones. Tired minds bogged down to the overgrowth of time. The child inside tries to escape. You can trace it back to the trap from which it sprang. Some of its shirt tatteredly snagged on the claws. Ready to recognise the world as a bowl of rotten fruit. To lunge and launch into the rigid constrictions of this reality, prepared to fend for itself with what little scraps are planted deep into dark pockets.

Alienation, disconnection, and so on.

But love. Don’t forget the fucking love.

A Yew launch show featuring Self-Immolation Music, Nation Unrest and others is on the 22nd Feb. Tickets HERE

Can Kicker | Bandcamp

Ryan Walker | Louder Than War

Main image by Tudor Rhys Etchells ©

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