![]() ![]() It was a massive shift in theme for Mount Eerie, and considered the best album of 2017 by a wide range of critics. The next year, “A Crow Looked at Me” came out. You can listen to “Glitch Princess” on most music streaming services, or on YouTube freely, as yeule’s made it available without ads: It speaks colors into that gray artery of the cyberpunk we live in, telling us that struggle, that flailing and gnashing and difficulty, that ability to still recognize the dissonance of it all, is the very thing that keeps us alive to ourselves inside of it. That universe it comes from can sometimes feel like just having clear eyes in our own, or as a warning, or as a commiseration, an understanding, or just a breath in the midst of it all, a moment to realize, yeah, someone else is feeling the disintegration, too, someone else can speak in the language of having to resist it to survive while embracing it to survive. ![]() It isn’t one of hopelessness, or hope, but rather one of what it’s like to get through it as best we can, keeping ourselves close to whole while wondering if our definition of wholeness itself has been too far moved to recognize anymore. The power of “Glitch Princess” lingers in its recognition of a way of feeling the world that was once viewed as fearful fantasy, too dire to envision as a realistic warning. Yet here, “The Things They Did for Me Out of Love” is no less intricately produced than the rest of “Glitch Princess”, and adds nearly five hours of evolving, atmospheric, and moving ambient drone onto the end of what’s already the best album of the year. It just tends to be the kind of addition that subtracts. I’ve seen artists do that before, usually sticking on some half-completed piece that’s inconsistently produced and directionless – and why not? They’re not constrained by digital releases, so if you’ve got it and want to share it, release it. Take “Too Dead Inside”, which starts with the 80s lute-by-synth sensibility of a Ray Lynch piece, and alternates between yeule’s own style and those we might more closely associate with an Audrey Nuna solo and a Lana Del Rey chorus.Īs if all that weren’t enough, the album released with an additional 4 hour, 44 minute ambient drone piece, “The Things They Did for Me Out of Love”. The songs are what they need to be, style something that can be mutated into a whole rather than a specific genre being chased. The difference in style between “Friendly Machine” and “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty” highlights yeule’s avant-garde approach to pop production. Reassurance itself arrives in the repeated playing of a memory, accessible only past a nightmare. ![]() Even the music video plays backwards as yeule sings forwards (they memorized the lyrics in reverse for the filming). How long can that keep going?Īnd so it repeats. Like William Gibson’s “Fragments of a Hologram Rose”, the sweetness of a moment is fueled by the overuse of spent, repeated memories. It’s feel-good and reassuring, yet the lyrics suggest it comes at the expense of yeule’s own self. “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty” is more indie-pop than anything else, save for a filtered backup chorus and autotuned portamentos sliding new phrases in with delicacy. The origin of intrusive thoughts can’t even be determined – from our own minds, from a post we read, from a search we did, and if the first is learning to encompass the others, what’s the separation? It was the same prevailing feeling of isolation in a world that never leaves you alone.Ī Singaporean artist whose life has been nomadic, and who feels the virtual world has been their most consistent home, many of yeule’s songs are cycles of memories and experiences held together by what was, a fight to keep the thin tissue of memory intact against a barrage of insistence it dissolve. The voice and aesthetic might be different, but the sensibility is the same choked sunset from the same window, that space between disconnection and yearning, that echo of a monument to what survival was a minute ago, before it changed and changed again and keeps on changing faster than most can manage. I’ve been chasing the musical feeling of Kelli Ali singing vocals into a cupboard, the strange sounds and repeating beats of her world making less and less sense save for this one trapped ghost of a voice. I’ve searched for anything else that feels like it visited from that particular universe of sensibility, that could communicate the way those 11 songs did. That came out in 1996, and as we descend into a world very much like the one they described, I still find that no musical artist has ever so successfully inhabited it. ![]()
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