Sticking a dirty thumb in the eye of fate, our third collaboration sees this marrow deep family malarky turn official as Pace Yourself teams up with YS’s own imprint ERF REC for a split release. As if our status as minor celebrities and footnotes of the underground could level off no further: the unification no one asked for is here. Sticking it to the man, handing your arse to ya on a plate, cauterising infected suburban minds world over.

»Burn« is the second YS album and written as a direct follow-up album to »Brutal Flowers«. If their first album was an exercise in the incremental, a construction of poise and patience, »Burn« should be taken way the fuck at its word – it quite literally finds catharsis in twisted reverse. Birthed out of the malignant kick found in deconstruction and chaos. Evil twin, psychotic younger sibling, call it what the hell you like. It might take you a moment to get the lay of the land in this darkly mutated world. Like a bug-eye’d native first confronted with a Zippo, the hit is radical and instant – a new way for the world to go up in smoke.

Splice the Seattle slacker scene with the spliffhead soundsystem culture of the ’90s Bristol trip-hop scene, then cross-breed that with the DIY optimism and glee in creation found in the cut-and-paste worlds of skate, graffiti, and hip hop. Now run that through the skitzo basement mind of John T. Gast and you’re close to the kind of scorched earth and spiked suburbia that birthed »Burn«.

Dunno quite what YS have been ingesting of late, but this massively twisted LP touches on a host of gloriously fucked, totemic underground sources while not sounding much like any of them. It has the ballsy swagger and hard flipping of the script as Massive Attack’s seminal »Blue Lines«. Indeed, the eponymous album tracks sound similar – the opener »Burn« is like a hard-nosed, jammed-out redux of »Blue Lines«. Getting into a kind of slow-spinning overdubbed maximal euphoria, ending with mumbled downer vocals, struggling to conceal their tongues in their cheeks, there’s an air of paranoia and proto-conspiracy theory. It’ll leave you scratching your head, feeling like you’ve stepped into a New World Order governed by a cacophony of dropouts, dope fiends, and apocalyptic stoners. A cracked-out world somewhere between Richard Linklater’s movie »Slacker« (1990) and Marc Singer’s »Dark Days« (2001).

The rest of the album parts like a tongue on a wine glass: Smith & Mighty, Bandulu, ambient Luke Slater records, Wah Wah Wino, Nurse With Wound, Land of the Loops, Placid Angels, Adrian Sherwood, Urban Tribe, and DJ Shadow can all be heard in momentary splatters – but »Burn«, like other works by YS, is its own ritual beast. »Moth«, a track which has been knocking about the underground deejay circuit for many moons, is a real raw chopped-and-screwed slice of stoner erotica that reeks of obsession and unrequited desire. Elsewhere, on tracks like »Switch«, »Trying«, and »Drift«, the throughline from »Brutal Flowers« can be heard. Underneath the driving heavy gravity, the trademark emotional intimacies of YS linger: eternal recurrence, ghosts of static and shortwave, worn memories of the playful and painful sort. The brief moments where flashes of orchestral ambience get out from underneath the swagger are so pure, personal, and unguarded that for a moment they leave you completely lonesome. In the album’s closer »End«, you can hear the fleeting promise and DIY possibilities of an analogue world and embers of ash that flutter in its wake – where it seemed, for a brief moment, that a collective of DJs, engineers, rappers, graffiti artists, and skate crews were emerging from the streets, giving the middle finger to the system, before just as quickly disappearing back to the doldrums of obscurity. »End« is a bittersweet ode to early soundsystem culture, MCs, and pirate radio – an out-of-step time where, for a moment, the underdogs and weirdos seemed to be kicking on the door of something bigger.

A veritable teenage doof suite dosed with desire, claustrophobia, and deviance. »Burn« is a good old howl at the moon – lonely, raw, and out for blood; basement-style exegesis at its best. A thump to the gut, a stud through your blood. A dubbed-to-death classic straight out of the annals of nowhere. A perfect postcard from oblivion. A bleak, bold, and personally ferocious vision of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

This is everything that record collectors skip dates for. Fuck the scene and keep that shit underground. That’s what it is all about. Know what I mean, if you do? You’re in…

Words by Jack Anderson