It's a viciously windy Monday evening and at the Shacklewell arms an unfeasibly tall Australian in a black baseball cap is prowling the stage, whipping a storm amongst the crowd, making n0teeth bust moves we didn't even know we had inside us. This is Yaws, E5's noisiest resident and purveyor of the finest sounds to come out of Clapton since "Layla" or "Cocaine" (just a lil joke about districts of the London Borough of Hackney/homonymous racist blues guitarists there for ya).
n0teeth is always fired up for some Yaws live action but especially since the recent-ish release of his (first?) full-length album, New Age Bonding, of which more shortly. Althought I was still nursing a few war wounds from Friday night's high intensity acid techno exploits, a free gig just up the road from n0teeth HQ was too good an opportunity to pass up, and with techno-grind merchant Donna Haringwey headlining, it promised to be an evening of noisy delights. Reader, you'll be proud of your boy: I finally got round to investing in a decent set of earplugs. £1.49 from Leyland SDM (doin' it again), you can't say fairer than that:
First on the bill was a new name to n0teeth, Velice The Menace, who turned out to be a skinny white dude in combat trousers spitting bars over skronky breaks emanating from a laptop, almost like a crusty Mike Skinner. The crowd was largely supportive - more than a few even seriously getting down on the dance floor - but it's safe to say I wasn't really feeling it and returned to the bar about ten minutes into his set.
After a few minutes of (entertainingly handled) technical fuckups Yaws unleashed the full primordial industrial techno bass onslaught from his machines, alternately gargling down the mic and offering the audience the chance to do same. n0teeth got a good Machadaynu-esque screech in. The audience writhed, slithered & shook rump. There is something so infectiously danceable about Yaws' absurdist mutant electronic racket you couldn't remain seated if you tried.
Donna Haringwey, too, brought beats you could bogle to, but with a more serious, less playful tone in this writer's opinion. The angle of Haringwey's sonic attack calls to mind strictly-no-joking US hardcore and, well, here at n0teeth Towers we do like a laugh. That's not to say DH's set was lacking in aggressive energy - far from it! - but it didn't quite have that faintly bizarre, utterly alien edge that makes you wonder if Yaws was really born in Australia or if he crash landed there like Big Lez.
"So what about that new Yaws album then?", I hear you cry. Well, my friends, it's a certifiable banger. From the pleasingly Containeresque opener "Startr" to the utterly sublime stop-start acid groove of "Satanic Drifting", every track on this thing hits all the right notes - even "Something 4 Ur Mind", which as you can probably guess from the title, is built around the single most grating sample in all of dance music.
And New Age Bonding very much IS dance music. You could always cut a rug to a few of Yaws' tracks - they certainly weren't lacking in rhythm or groove - but on this album the throbbing electronic barrage sounds more explicitly club-friendly than ever before. Especially on "Good Times To The Max", a tune that does more of what it says on the tin than any piece of electronic music has done since Great Dose Of Monotonous Techno.
If you like what you're hearing, don't just buy the album - go get some live!