Album of the week with Nilüfer Yanya: Hold on to her guitar

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Musician Nilüfer Yanya

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MollyDaniel

Album of the week:

In these times you want to wall yourself in, just stay in bed, turn off the TV and the Internet with its news and war alerts, pull the covers over your head.

But then the thoughts begin to race and gnaw again.

Dogs are barking on the street below, there seems to be life out there, but the pale winter sun doesn't even make it over the roofs of the skyscrapers.

Get up or stay down?

what hurts more

From this state of leadenness, the British musician Nilufer Yanya has created fascinatingly immersive indie pop.

"Dogs fight/ Stayed up all morning/ Thought I could feel something/ But my mind keeps jumping/ Back and forth," she sings breathlessly in the hectic "Stabilise," one of the best tracks on her album "Painless."

The songs that follow are about the decision to end a relationship that has become torturous;

about measuring the tension: staying in the usual comfort zone?

Or give in to the urge already throbbing in every fiber of your body to run down the stairwell – into a new, still unclear existence, even if you might stumble in the process.

This pain of departure doesn't have to be bad, it at least ends the much more painful stasis: "Until you fall it's painless," says "Shameless," which should actually be the title song.

But also: »In these four walls I'm faithless.«

By coincidence, Yanya's very private album fits in well with this time when political certainties and certainties are crumbling.

However, there are no answers, rather a cocoon of sound that functions like a safe space for reflection.

You have to be able to get involved with this gyrating music, which isn't really rock, not really R&B, on the one hand earthy and solid, on the other hand electronically clattering and noisy.

Stability is only offered by the guitar, which Nilüfer Yanya keeps in constant, propelling momentum and melody movement: what she plays on it is sometimes amazingly reminiscent of the early albums by The Police (»Shameless«, »Chase Me«), actually none cool reference for young female musicians.

Yanya often takes inspiration from the nineties rock of Pixies, Pavement and Radiohead,

Only towards the end does the album open up to some clearer hymns or pop songs like »Belong With You« or »Another Life«, but in between it almost comes to a standstill, for example in the autopilot disorientation of »L/R« or the breathy pangs of conscience ambivalence of »Trouble«.

The autonomy as a musician and songwriter that Yanya shows here, even if she ventures into more complex, ambient-like structures, is very impressive.

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Nilufer Yanya

Painless

Label: Pias/Ato

Label: Pias/Ato

approx. €16.49

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03/04/2022 7:39 p.m

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As early as 2019, the singer, born in London in 1995, was considered a great hope of the British indie pop scene.

But their debut album "Miss Universe" was too overloaded with ambitious meta-narratives and designed too much to offer hits that were as catchy as possible.

Like many other pop artists, the musician with roots in Turkey, Ireland and Barbados has apparently found a focus on her musical idea in the months of lockdown and silence (and lovesickness).

The really big eruption might come with the next album, as Nilüfer Yanya already seems to know: »I'm not halfway up to speed«, she sings in »The Mystic«, still very despondent and bogged down in her intimate riddles and pop -Arabesques, "I don't think you'll notice".

Yes, probably.

Listened briefly:

The Weather Station - "How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars"

The Canadian musician Tamara Lindeman withheld from us the best songs from her album »Ignorance«, which was released last year.

Until now.

She found the piano ballads, which have now been released as an extra album, to be "too inward, too soft" to stand up to the other, opulent and powerfully instrumented pieces.

They even include the song that gave the predecessor its title.

It's about the Briton who gave the Australian magpie the name "Magpie" - and thus locked the bird in a colonial word prison.

Widening the awareness of such narrowing of the view of nature, climate change or simply love is what this touchingly tender half hour is all about, which not only complements »Ignorance« but, one may say, completes it into a masterpiece.

The Original Haseland Orchestra – »Music for Self-Driving Cars«

Self-driving cars are kind of scary, but having this soundtrack in the onboard system could easily take away the fear of losing control of the stick shift.

Or not: It's crazy how the musician and producer Martin Schmeing, who has been the bandleader of the alternative pop singer Christian Steiffen for years, squanders autotune pop hits that have gotten out of hand on his teasing concept album Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Carl Craig, NDW and chamber music .

So it's straight from the »country outing« to the Kling-Klang »mobile construction site« or the Mojo »washing plant«.

The man from Osnabrück calls this futuristic easy listening »Discodriving«.

It's a feat, but unlikely he gets it rocked home to wondrous Haseland.

Hands off the steering wheel!

Kaina - »It Was a Home«

Oh, how beautiful, an ultra-smoothly melting retro Motown album!

No, not at all.

All the better.

The young singer Kaina, whose family comes from Guatemala and Venezuela, may not be from Detroit but from nearby Chicago, but on her second album she sings as sweetly and beguilingly as her famous Tamla role models from the sixties.

But then weird P-funk and electronic space sounds keep spluttering and popping in their delicate, gently dabbed R&B, as if George Clinton or the future hip-hoppers Brainfeeder had their fingers in the pie.

Of course, there are also subtle South American rhythms and echoes in this sensually playful reconciliation between Kaina's childhood and homeland - and with "Ultraviolet" finally proof that the Sleater-Kinney collaborators here are also a soul band.

Weird but sweet.