Review Summary: Yayayayayayayayayayayaya
yayayayayayayayayayaya
yayayayayayayayayaya
The night is dark and, should you choose to sit through the whole thing, seemingly endless. Why bother? What’s to find there? Korean polymath Yaya Kim embeds two answers into her stage name: her doubled ‘Ya’, from the Japanese 夜, literally translates as Night-Night, but we are to conceive the first ‘Ya’ as
mysterious, dark night and the latter as
splendid and brilliant night. This is probably badass and definitely pretentious, but the gist is obvious enough not to bear quibbling. Is it dark and splendid, or splendid and dark? Can I, two whole sentences on, remember which otherwise interchangeable ‘Ya’ is which? Absolutely not, but that’s beside the point: Yaya Kim’s bivalent affinity with all things nocturnal is understood, and she’s already deconstructed it so cleanly that there’s no need for us to dirty our paws over the same motions. Night is night, whichever way you put it together. Yaya is here and her vibe is clear - the rest is history.
That’s just the upshot of two measly ‘Ya’s. What Yaya Kim accomplishes across 33 (!!) individual songs is on the one hand totally different - one does not reduce a 144-minute jazz-pop monolith to a dinky nomenclature tie-in - and on the other hand virtually the same. These tracks are teeming with individual nuances, as remarkable for their small acts of diversity as they are for their unwaveringly noirish commitment to the atmosphere of the circus, the carnaval and - above all - cabaret. This thing is drenched in smoke and incense, leather and velvet, and, one almost infallibly excellent song after the next, these textures and scents start to speak far louder than any individual performance. The album’s sequencing is a curious blend of totally adequate and borderline irrelevant: smooth tracklisting certainly makes it easier to swallow, but the sum of its parts is so overwhelming that you can put digesting it on the level of individual songs entirely out of mind. As per mysterious-Ya and splendid-Ya, it doesn’t really matter which order you remember, or even experience this record: care to parse 33 consecutive ‘Ya’s (see summary)? There
are departures and extremities, and you could dig your heels in and triangulate the record between, say, the sorrowful piano ballad “Sorry for being born”, the rollicking “YAYA’s Way”, and the blood-haltingly ghoulish “Samsara”; likewise, there are discrete differences between the three discs, respectively voracious, mercurial and fragile. These do not matter: this album is very long and very good. All other truths are immaterial. Yaya Kim sings in at least four different languages and makes them all sound
good, but the egregiously extra acts of indulgence and unapologetically massive talent that it takes to make this kind of power move (a.k.a. Album) transcends its means of articulation after a certain point. It is unambiguously good music; it begs no introduction; there is too much of it; you can decide how to handle this. The night is long, etc..
