Review Summary: Matutinal of the vespertine / Testosterone and estrogen
If foresight could be attained through the rolling of bones, if shoving innocent children into volcanoes satiated the magma-dwelling deities and guaranteed a bountiful harvest, if human behavioural patterns truly followed the lunar phase, if every poorly conceived opinion or too-briskly busted nut in my past, present, and future were attributable to a planet's location in space or any force greater than my strength of character and perseverance in the face of adversity, life would be really f
ucking easy. Maybe.
It's tempting to launch a rational counter-offensive every time the likes of astrology or tarot earnestly enter a conversation. There's even a particular section of the Dewey Decimal System (roughly 150-200, if you're interested) that seems to exist solely to contain dream analysers, crystal worshippers, and horoscope advocates, placing them alongside certified carers in nearby bookshelves – philosophers and psychologists who can coolly observe and diagnose them on their left, and religious types who can bag an easy, life-saving conversion on their right.
Allow me to withdraw my 12 gauge from this barrel before I blow these barramundi to bits. There is a kind of wisdom to be found within alchemy that goes beyond trying to synthesise gold from your piss. There is informative history behind even the most questionable branches of metaphysics. As much as I feel the need to stand in opposition to the false hope that these fields can represent for the desperate and vulnerable, understanding the stories that have brought these fields of 'study' into being is a journey worth taking if we want to view these subjects from a – apologies for the homeopathic-esque terminology – holistic perspective. My point as it relates to Yugen Blakrok's second full-length LP,
Anima Mysterium, is that Yugen is somebody who has done her f
ucking research, so casting your prejudices about such topics aside is an essential first step in appreciating her lyrics.
Yugen Blakrok's freedom of expression in her music manifests in a lyrical maelstrom that fuses occultism, the spiritual, the divine, the cosmos, science-fiction, self-liberation, and all kinds of other sh
it that will ultimately either scare people away the first time they hear words like “retrograde” or “prana”, or otherwise pull them into a seething hotbed of cryptic ciphers to decipher.
Blakrok's lyrics on opener “Gorgon Madonna” are a tasty slice of what's to come. She comes in thick and fast with her ear-catching accent and laid back delivery, thematic touchstones including the aforementioned metaphysics, meditations on gender – “
Ambidextrous androgen / I'm both the empress and the king” – and more cultural references than one could reasonably be expected to keep up with. This track alone namedrops Medusa, Mary Shelley, Anakin, Kevin Bacon, Artemis, Lilith, Cerberus, Hydra, the Lyra constellation, and probably a couple other things I missed. Yugen's net is cast wide, and I can assure you that she keeps up this pace throughout
Anima Mysterium's rather lengthy length.
Avoiding a hasty and inaccurate analysis of Blakrok's lyrics, the main takeaway here is that she simply
does not stop, and consequently doesn't have a weak verse on the album. However, her delivery does become somewhat monotonous over the 52 minutes the album lasts for, as there are not any significant switch-ups in cadence or flow. On top of this, there are some hooks that are quite dull (“Obsidian Night”, “Picture Box”), as we are presented with looped stanzas of lyrics that could have been lifted straight from any given verse, with a slight lift in dynamics to signal that it's chorus time.
On the plus side, this is nothing close to a deal-breaker. Every track is strong when judged on its own merits, and there are enough variations surrounding Blakrok's performances to distract from her ubiquity. The featuring verses on here are perfectly crafted and placed, with Historian Himself's destructive and elucidating swagger kicking off the banging “Hibiscus” in style, the legendary Kool Keith popping up with an astronomical verse on the deliciously sci-fi “Mars Attacks” (only to be upstaged by our South African of the Hour), and Jak Tripper's personality-laden contribution to “Metallik Crow” is a f
ucking romp.
The other factor distracting from homogeneity is long-time collaborator Kanif the JhatMaster's production. Given that his beats tend to thrive on simple addition/subtraction of sounds around a loop or bassline, this might sound counter-intuitive. At large, his sound reads like dälek on DXM – glacial, layered soundscapes are kept afloat with consistent, snappy boom bap percussion. Unlike dälek, aggression is checked at the door. Every sample chosen elevates the music and its meaning, as he draws thoughtful dialogues from the likes of
Forbidden Planet and Burroughs. Khanif habitually introduces effective sounds at the right time, such as the horns that pierce through “Hydra”'s fog, the Om-like high-register bassline and tonic-riding vocals of “Monatomic Mushroom”, “Ocher”'s magnificent treated vocals (or is it a horn? F
ucked if I know) followed up with its skittering hats and an exploratory bassline. We even get a few scratching sessions for you oldheads out there.
Khanif is as integral to this album's successes as Yugen Blakrok herself, and when the two make creative compromises we see their most effective work. This is best demonstrated by “Carbon Form”, which gives us one huge verse followed by an extended outro in which we really get to breathe the slowly morphing beat in. When ignoring traditional song structures in such creative ways, this duo show signs that they have the potential to climb above
Anima Mysterium's already excellent heights into the land of the masterful.
Or maybe the planets just need to align.
