Review Summary: math-whatever (math-pop? math-folk? math-bedtime-story?) and it's really good
Lyrically, Yvette Young fishes imagery from the deep well of Walt Disney’s legacy and there’s a good chance it’s because she’s not of this planet. Songwriting that is more missive than poetry is a risky approach wholly for the fact that it bears down more intensely on the music; it imposes itself on the world that allows it to exist. It seems, though, that Yvette refuses to let her acoustic guitar collapse under the weight of her own whimsical declarations.
Ignore me, I’m being verbose. Basically, she’s really talented and it sounds at times like she’s playing multiple instruments at once.
Certainly, this isn’t too distant from the truth. I think “multi-instrumentalist” can be too generously applied (I’m looking at
you, Bruno Mars’ Wikipedia page), but Yvette handles keys and strings as well as she does her guitar; which is to say – why can’t I do what she does? Conversely, Yvette treats song-writing like a first conversation, withdrawing information, deftly inhibiting all of her ideas so as to not inundate whoever’s listening.
Hauntsly Pinkerdinkle (leave me alone, autocorrect) is the only song to introduce a violin and suddenly it’s the quietly dwindling denouement of a fairy tale and I can’t stop using words like “fantastical”.
Acoustics belongs nowhere but in places of immense colour, but if it does find itself in stretches of all-embracing ennui, its resolve spreads through the gloom like paint in a pot of ink. It is in listening to this EP that the cover art reveals its depth. Yvette finds herself in the deepest of caverns and writes music to claw her way out of them. This counterbalance is revealed in
Mermaid.
“When I come home to his hands around my neck / I’m a whore / I’m a liar” is not a line you’d find in
Cinderella 2: The Domestic Years, but the intensity of the lyric is assuaged by the nimble finger-picking, dancing around the blows delivered.
“I’m still happy / I’m still dreaming of the sea”, she follows up, escaping realities along with her math-rock stylings.
I think
Acoustics is a delightful and vivid little piece of worldbuilding. It’s hard to know if this world is based in fact or fiction and it doesn’t matter, because there are enough little details for you to live in it. Yvette’s universe is everything this one isn’t. It’s utterly vibrant. It’s inchoate. It’s scarcely populated, and it’s…
Fantastical.
There, I said it.
