Yakuzi - Yakuzi

  by Anthony Dhanendran

published: 16 / 6 / 2003

Label: Pause Music
Format: CD

intro

Adventurous debut mini-album from Basque trio, which avoids categorisation " elusively skirting between post-rock and a more melodic pop style"

Yakuzi “link post-rock dynamics with slow burning melodies”, according to their press release. The Basque three-piece formed in 1999 and then their label went under. Undaunted, they laboured for two years (it’s taken another two for the band to cross the English Channel) and have produced a distinctive and strangely beautiful album. They specialise in crafting the kind of densely layered musical structures that are commonplace in the English-speaking (if such a thing can be defined) post-rock world but whose foreign counterparts are less well-known. The pieces all begin relatively simply but by the climax of each, have become finely textured with subtle use of scratchy guitars and other samples including, on the opening track 'Vittu', a snatch of opera, which comes as an incongruous but not unpleasant surprise after all those guitars. Yakuzi are less angry than Godspeed and less scary than the Third Eye Foundation. At times it can all seem a little too well-produced, a little too clean, but it never seems fake. The use of vocals in the Basque language is another way the band distance themselves from their more outré post-rock compadres. They are somehow more friendly, more accessible, while still creating inventive and captivating sounds. This is only a mini-album, lasting a mere 33 minutes – short even by the standards of the genre. This is an album that defies categorisation – elusively skirting between post-rock and a more melodic pop style, it, like the music it contains, is definitely a grower. Repeated listening is rewarded by new discoveries, of underlying melodies and unforeseen samples. The closing track is a cover of My Bloody Valentine’s 'Sometimes' which manages to blend with its surroundings successfully, but not be subsumed into the post-rock melange. It is a blissed-out, chilled-out closer to an album that doesn’t put its listeners under too much pressure but washes over the ears and soothes the senses. The ideal sunrise music for the festival season, in fact.

Track Listing:-