Review Summary: Brilliant.
Lovely... lovely... and yet what you may initially hear is a tale of abrasion. The tale the Breadmakers themselves weave is one of melancholy, one of desperation and rage, and yet one with a few silver linings. From the illustrious introductory monologue "Ballad of Bread" to the beautiful sea shanties permeating "God Gave You Smell of Duty: Love Rocky and Bullwinkle," The Delicious Bread Collection have created a glorious piece of work that rivals Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's best compositions. Mixing free jazz, depressing ambient moments, grindcore, progressive rock, and whatever the fuck else they decided to throw into the mix (I've listened to this so many times, and yet I still realize not its full potential... truly amazing), Tales from the Yeast Side is quite the eclectic affair. I mean, where else can you listen to two songs that reference Neutral Milk Hotel's work and those two songs happen to be vastly superior to NMH? I sure don't know.
All I know is how this album made me feel. "Apocalypse Spook"'s br00tal grind burst symbolizes more in forty-one seconds than a wank musician like Yngwie Malmsteen does in ten minutes. "Dedenbach's Solo" may simply sound like a saxophone shredding over the keyboard used in the Rugrats opening theme, but within this chaos, it presents a clear conflict of the human spirit. The clean synthesizer aims to display dominance over the raw saxophone wailing, as if a primal depiction of good and evil's constant fight against one another. Shit like that is what makes this album work, and I feel as if the dissonant minimalist guitar notes ending the album have gutted me mentally where I lay. I feel so much hate on this record... and yet so much love and burning passion to balance it out. I'm in limbo... but I do know one thing. This album's amount of truth cannot be matched. It's harrowing, beautiful, ugly, bat-shit insane, and just about everything else. Above all, though, it's brilliant.
