Yayla - Nihaihayat
Emir Togrul, the main guy behind Yayla, is one busy dude. On top of playing all of the instruments, he apparently is a filmmaker and puts the materials for each CD together by hand. He also apparently hand paints each Yayla t-shirt that is produced. I say “apparently” because this comes from the band’s press release. I don’t doubt that Emir Togrul does a lot of work for his band, but when you consider how much absolute horse shit is put in your average press release… Let’s just say that I have my doubts about it. Trust me, I’ve seen some press releases that were so full of it that you wonder who wrote them and if the writer actually listened to the album they were promoting. Yayla’s newest release is going to stand or fall on its musical merits, not what’s written in their press materials. Nihaihayat, the follow-up to last year’s Sathimasal LP (unless you count the soundtrack for Togrul’s film Fear Through Eternity, from later in 2012), is much in the same vein as its predecessor. Like Burzum, Yayla is a band that prefers the epic length song. There are three actual songs, each one clocking in at over twelve minutes. The intro and outro tracks (“Integumental Grasp” and “In Senility”) are a hair over five minutes each. The three songs are very repetitive, beating riffs into the floor in the same way that Burzum, Judas Iscariot and old Xasthur used to. While Sathimasal was more “cold and empty” sounding, Nihaihayat has more of a “wall of sound” feeling. The guitars are more prominent and also fuller. It’s definitely noisier, with a raw, dirty feeling similar to Darkthrone’s Transylvanian Hunger LP. I normally want a more polished recording, but Nihaihayat has definitely grown on me. I like that this album, while structurally similar to Sathimasal, has a more in-your-face attitude. It’s more “immediate” where its predecessor was distant and cold. That “immediacy” made a big difference to me, because otherwise I would’ve said that this lacked progression or any major changes to the band’s style.
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