YHWH Nailgun’s 45 Pounds is a Gnarly, Coagulated Debut
The New York band’s first offering is a grotesque, eccentric reverie of feels-bad-man doom music. The songs are uncomfortable, foolish and, above all, brassy.
It’s pronounced “Yahweh.” And YHWH is a name so sacred it is no longer pronounced in Jewish tradition. After the Babylonian Exile in 6th century BCE, Jewish people ceased using the tetragrammaton in favor of “Elohim,” a Hebrew noun meaning “God.” Elohim was rendered in power, in an Israel God’s supremacy over all others, the mortal and the mystical included. In the books of Samuel, God was known as He Brings the Hosts into Existence. But before it was revealed to Moses in Exodus, Yahweh was known by his tribe of Levi, and it is said that YHWH is a “religious invocation of no precise meaning,” an interpretation chronicled through “mysterious and awesome splendor of the manifestation of the holy.”
Zack Borzone writhes on stage like some great, divine and unknowable thing has pillaged the normality out of his body, invoking the “no precise meaning” of the very YHWH he represents. In Austin barely a week ago, I watched him slink his combat boots across a platform stage, delivering inaudible, guttural sounds into a virgin microphone. And this was at 12 in the afternoon, mind you. Borzone sings like he’s about to cough up his lunch, but he moves his limbs like a spasming contortionist. There is something sickly—perhaps gnarly—about the way he purses his lips, or in the blank, blackened gaze of his piercing eyes. He is a collision of menace and diva; something fascinating yet oh so very gaudy. Watching him move, it feels vulgar to stare—but you can’t look away, nor do you want to; the clanging, angular guitars and breathing, vivacious synths capture and hold your attention even in horror.
Borzone’s band, YHWH Nailgun, have spawned out of a New York City era under great siege by in-your-face, non-conforming noise-makers alike. I’m thinking of bands like Lip Critic, Model/Actriz and Machine Girl. But YHWH Nailgun’s music makes my skin crawl in a way that feels far more spiritual and relentless than that of those aforementioned groups. Borzone, Saguiv Rosenstock, Jack Tobias and Sam Pickard are players influenced by Xiu Xiu, Television and 3 Chairs, brought together in the throes of COVID when Bandcamp-only releases were intoxicating. But they’re closer in league with a band like the Serfs from Cincinnati—metallic electro-punks blasting listeners with grime-covered, sunken textures tarnished by a glaze of shock-rock skeletons and sexy, disarming edges. But even then, YHWH Nailgun don’t have any interest in conceding to a template, instead threatening to dismantle the very fabric of experimental music by being so devoutly in-tune with its most academic instincts. They’re the mole inside the post-industrial tenet; a poison to indie rock’s formulaic habits.