Yikes - "Whoa Coma/Blood Bomb"

Yikes - "Make a House" (Kill Shaman 2007)

Yikes – Whoa Comas/Blood Bombs / Kill Shaman

From Kill Shaman website:

"Yikes was formed when Dwyer called an end to Coachwhips to try something new, something more fun and explosive in nature."

Okay, let's think about this. San Francisco garage-noise maker extraordinaire John Dwyer wants to try something more fun than the Coachwhips. The fucking garage pop-rock trio whose every riff, vocal and snare snap was drug through a multitude of distorted, blown-out amplifiers to create a sound that eventually was just the sawdust remains of the original hook-heavy songwriting. He wants something more fun than that? Go back and listen to the blistering, excited blues-rock of Bangers vs Fuckers and prove to me it doesn't send you thrashing around your studio apartment in a sweaty destructive rage. And let's remember, the Coachwhips incarnation followed Pink and Brown, an even more abrasive explosion of lo-fi guitar-and-drum noise hysteria. So Dwyer's latest band is his escape to finally make something "fun and explosive"… I worry for my eardrums.

Here's my hypothesis: Dwyer dismantled the Coachwhips a few years ago, and since then, he's been focusing mostly on his OCS/OhSees side project. The few albums he put out under that guise are an eerie mix of folk and trembling dissonance, which can be fun as he experiments by jumping from the inside to the outside of folk's limitations; though that certainly makes for a more somber mode of writing and performing. Perhaps the press release writer misunderstood Dwyer – which is wholly possible if his regular speaking voice is anywhere near the megaphone distorted yelps of his recorded persona – and Yikes is actually his escape from the mellow confines, no matter how skewed it may be, of his folk outfit. Then again, maybe Dwyer is just a tonal nihilist and he truly felt that the Coachwhips were the equivalent of a pleasant evening stroll through a pasture of daffodils and button-nosed, dewy-eyed rabbits.

But just how does Dwyer up the acridity of a sound that is already so abrasive and confrontational? He drops the only instrument formerly anchoring his group down to anything even reminiscent of melody – the keyboardist – and adds a second guitar player, which apparently is patched through the very same sputtering amplifier as Dwyer. In fact, throughout most of their brief seven-song EP – Whoa Comas/Blood Bomb – it is almost impossible to discern Dwyer’s guitar from his new accomplice, Eric Park (Curse of the Birthmark, Fuck Wolf). Behind the stripped-down kit now sits Mike Donavan (Big Techno Werewolves, Ropers, NAM), and together they form a convulsing mess of overblown blues-tinged garage-rock that sounds like The Fall if Mark E. Smith wasn’t so obsessed with having his drunken rants cued so high in the mix or Bob Log III if he could afford to clone a few copies of himself to form the band of his dreams.

In the tradition of most noisy garage-rock bands, Yikes keeps it brash and succinct with Whoa Comas/Blood Bomb consisting of seven manic tunes in less than fifteen minutes. The band basically works in two modes: fast or bluesy. This method is exemplified by moving back and forth between each approach in the tracklisting. So after the EP’s riff-and-roll opener, “Carol Ann”, they dropped into the menacing blues stomp of “The Wick”. Donavan’s snare and surprisingly deep thudding bass drum march straight through the shards of flailing guitar distortion and Dwyer’s unintelligible megaphone squawks and back into the sweltering Delta swamp from which they originally stemmed. When they miss sequencing the tracks with variation in mind, the songs get muddled even more than they probably intended. The punk-derived “No Guaranty” dives straight into “Blood Bomb”, and the tracks are so similar in pace and style that it sounds more like a brief hiccup in a single song instead of an actual track change.

For my money, Yikes excels when they abandon all punk intentions for straight up blues turmoil underpinned by 60s rock’n’roll. “Make a House” for example finds Dwyer yelping like the lost stepchild of The Kingsmen’s Jack Ely from behind a bluesy three-note molasses riff – heavily distorted of course. Park uses his guitar to make a sound not far from that of a waling siren and Donavan just does his best to be heard from behind the tangled mess of fuzzy distortion. Just as Dwyer hoped, it’s fun and explosive and packaged succinctly enough for repeated listens. Is it that far flung from The Coachwhips or even Pink and Brown though? No, but if you were into those bands, this should appease your appetite endlessly.