Desert rock legends Yawning Man return with a new album, and it’s not all bright desert sunshine.
Today’s band, Yawning Man, should need no introduction if you are into Stoner Rock, but if you don’t know them, then let me give you a small history lesson. Around 1986, Gary Arce, Alfredo Hernandez, and brothers Mario and Larry Lalli used to play music together. Sometimes they played in garages around La Quinta, California, but at other times they would drive out into the desert with a generator and just jam, for hours. These get-togethers would sometimes be called generator parties and would carry on into the night, with lots of herbal cigarettes (as my mum would call them) doing the rounds.
These parties were frequented by John Garcia, Josh Homme and Brant Bjork who would go on to form Kyuss, who were directly influenced by Yawning Man and their Desert sound. Kyuss would be forever known as the originators of Desert rock, but they were influenced by Yawning Man, so to say that Yawning Man are a legendary band would be doing them a dis-service. Now, for whatever reason, they never caught the Zeitgeist like their more popular contemporaries (mainly because their music is steadfastly their own, and not immediately accessible like most Stoner Rock bands). All of which is to say that the fact that Yawning Man are still going strong and still making outstanding albums like Pavement Ends, their latest, should be admired and applauded.
Opener “Burrito Power” (which by the way, is my favourite song name I’ve heard in years!) sets the scene for the whole album. A desert dry guitar tone, immediately transports you to those arid dunes. It’s as expansive as the never ending horizon and hot as hell. It’s not all sunshine and light though, there is an undercurrent at play, not immediately accessible, but felt forebodingly deep in your marrow.
“Gestapo Pop” follows this same pattern, lush repeating notes bask in the sunrays, regenerating lost energy, but yet again, there is that other side, the sun causing cracking fault lines opening up and glimpsing the darkness within, buried deep in the crust of the Earth. But I don’t want you to think this foreboding takes away from the warm desert feel of the album, it actually enhances proceedings with its duality and provides extra depth, the music benefiting from this added shade.
Lead single “Bomba Negro” is next and it’s a real stand out. More like an underground rumble, the rich musical tapestry burrowing away, feeling the rolling bass beneath your feet. This isn’t about the raw power of the guitar, it’s the absence around it which is prevalent, the space it leaves behind. It’s magical stuff.
The rest of the album cements this feeling of expansiveness, if you’ve ever seen a film where the main protagonist is driving an open topped car along the desert highway, looking pensive, a little worse for wear and with bags on the passenger seat, well, this album is the sonic equivalent of that image. The title track feels like the essence of dusk, bottled and filtered down into musical form.
This album retains the hallmarks of Yawning Man - the desert roots, the instrumental bravura, the spaciousness - yet it ventures into moodier terrain. It plays with contrast: light and shadow, openness and compression, movement and stasis. This is rock that knows its surroundings - that knows the heat, the dust, the otherworldly stillness of that Californian outskirt terrain - but instead of simply basking in it, it turns inward. Pavement Ends is not the easy road. It’s the point where the easy road gives out. Yawning Man have taken the end of the pavement as a beginning. And the result is quietly powerful.
