Review: Yeule @ The Sinclair 9/9

Photo Credit: Vasso Vu

Review by Owen Butler

Many artists, noteworthily Pat Bennitar, sing of love as a battlefield. This metaphor is not quite enough for Singaporean multiinstrumentalist Yeule. On their new album, Yeule symbolizes love as a struggle between an oppressive post-apocalyptic authoritarian regime and the riff-raff rebels that emerge as resistance. Yeule took the stage with political gusto, battlecrying the militant single “Skullcrusher” from the newly released “Evangelic Girl Is a Gun.” 

Backed by Elijah Ford of Her Knew Knife on drums and Ben Kim of Kimfitz as lead guitarist, Yeule’s setlist flowed with the swiftness of political rhetoricFrom the rageful, pathos-evoking vocals on “Skullcrusher”, to the morbidly seducing persona for “Tequila Coma” and “The Girl Who Sold Her Face”, the nuanced, anti-militaristic critique of war throughout “1967”, their songs consist of heavy sounds and even heavier topicsThe elements could be viewed as a deterrent, but the crowd couldn’t get enough.. 

The setlist lightened up sonically, although not so much thematically, for “What3vr”, “Dudu”, “Eko”, and “VV”. Yeule captured the stage with hand and body movements comparable to Caroline Polachek’s unique and complex stationary choreography. The artist’s presence was undeniable and all-encompassing throughout any issue that arose, whether broken guitar string or wardrobe malfunction. Oozing Lou-Reed-level cool, Yeule kept The Sinclair in a complete trance for the entire 11 song setlist. 

Yeule is as much a musical artist as they are a visual artist, evident in their ethereal and alluring backdrop on which they projected clips from music videos and upcoming visual projects related to “Evangelic Girl is a Gun.” Yeule’s unique visual artistry is a phantasmagoria of niche internet and video game references. 

With a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins at University of the Arts London, Yeule possesses the ability to flawlessly translate their music to a visual state. The sounds of their synths and pedals, glitchy percussive beats, and filtered harmonies are translated into video form projected on a screen behind them. The clips feature Yeule in crystal blue tanks, on a motorcycle in a room of industrial rot, in settings that feel familiar but only exist in the digiverse.

For the second half of the set, Yeule draws on their 2023 release “softscars” for the following songs, “softscars”, “dazies”, and “sulky baby.”Each song starts with a heaping portion of distortion, but that doesn’t stop the crowd from recognizing the songs immediately. 

Thematically looser than “Evangelic Girl Is a Gun,” the previous album gives each song more room to breathe. In a similar vein, these songs breathed a new life into the music hall. All three songs buzzed through the air with shoegaze distortion and melodies straight from Avril Lavigne’s 2004 back-catalogue. 

In the age of parasocial relationships between audiences and their favorite artists, one might think that Yeule’s heavy internet presence would breed a fanbase that crosses the boundaries of artist-audience relations. This couldn’t be fuarther from the truth. While there were your everyday shouters, I heard some of the most wholesome shouts from an audience: “Oh my days!” and “Oh jolly!” were a few of many delightful interjections made throughout the night. 

With no competition, the heart of the show was “Saiko”, a glitchy pop dance-ballad whose lyrics were screamed by the crowd in something between a psalmodic worship and a reluctant cry of surrender. The song itself is a pill-dulled missive to a helpless lover, but its calm start is stifled with AG Cook’s intense production. The song features sounds of rifles being cocked as percussion and dial-up tones as synth leads, blurring the lines between physical and digital forms of communication. In the political campaign that the Eva Girl Eva Girl ttour is, “Saiko” is Yeule waving a white flag to the overwhelming bombardment of oppressive love. 

The setlist ends with their cover of “Anthem For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene for the 2024 Jane Schoenbrun film, “I Saw the TV Glow”.” The lyrics fit right into Yeule’s catalogue as a chant directed back to one’s younger self. Adding their own harmonies to the opening lyrics, Yeule turns Emily Haines’ contemplative tone into a haunting reverberation on the lyrics “Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that.””. As Yeule left the stage, within the same breath, the crowd went from cheering to calling for an encore.

Everyone was waiting the whole concert for the title track of the new album, knowing the song would light up the whole music hall–and it did. Yeule couldn’t keep their own excitement at the reactive crowd, evident by a post-show story post showcasing their bloodied hand missing a nail with a caption “boston, u were the best crowd ever.””. The final song of the night was the fan favorite “X w X,””, a screamo-pop shoegaze concoction that swept many right off their feet. Without reaching too far back into their catalogue, Yeule generated such an intimacy between the audience and their own artistic vision that the singer at times appeared a translucent medium between the real and the digital.