The Yin Yangs – ‘Taste’ (album stream) (premiere)

My first time seeing Brooklyn heavy psych trio the Yin Yangs remains present in my mind over a year after the fact, which is something that cannot always be said for any rising act throughout the borough. I happened to be aimlessly drinking in the back of popular Bushwick venue Palisades when it happened. The Yin Yangs took the stage with a Stan Brakhage film as their backdrop and proceeded to play with enough intensity, volume and visual stimulus to encompass the entire room. They have been a live favorite ever since.

Real-time intensity can be tricky to package, but the band’s new Time Castle Tapes release, Taste, has the pacing and magnetism of an ideal live set. The release’s two heaviest numbers, “Life in Space” and “Electricity”, wisely bookend a collection of tracks that have a brevity not often seen in psychier, stonier climes. The whole thing is a little like Wand without the nerdiness, but songs like “Shooting”, which owes some strange debt to “Slang King” by the Fall, are idiosyncratic enough to defy easy genre designations.

The Yin Yangs will be unveiling Taste at Brooklyn’s Idio Gallery on Saturday, September 12 with PRIMA, MPHO, and Bambara, another trio for which mind-altering loudness bears indelible results.