Review Summary: room to breathe... *sigh*
PAINLESS was a crystal clear step-up for an artist that fashioned a razor-sharp indie sound by restricting her husky vocal performance to operate under noisey drum loops and fuzzed-out guitars providing over 30 atmospheres worth of barometric pressure. It was a winning formula that contrasted with Nilüfer Yanya's exactingly lush tones and provided propulsion to her mellowest of songs. But, aside from a pair of excellent but misleading early-album singles (making her even closer to her 90s influences than I assumed), she largely tosses that approach out the window on her follow-up album
My Method Actor.
Her clatter and crunch is replaced by… nothing really, allowing her exceptional voice room to breathe. But rather than pushing the horizons of her sound, she settles into pleasant ambient and folk textures to mixed results. Lacking its predecessor’s claustrophobic density, the songwriting ambles on, and *vibey* tracks like “Mutations” and “Binding” lurch past the four and five-minute mark (respectively) with no sense of direction. No single song here is remotely bad, but when “Ready for Sun (touch)” stumbles into familiar traps before building into a surprisingly layered and affecting midpoint for the album, the surrounding quality plateau becomes all the more confounding.
And if I sound harsh, the individual tracks certainly don't deserve it. The album is full of cuts like “Just a Western” or “Made Out of Memory,” which sound excellent out of context but become shapeless and jelly-like when smushed together in album form. Ascribing a clear goal for this record is tricky--it neither dips into shameless-hook territory nor makes any apparent moves to surpass her previous vocal chops. No,
My Method Actor is very likely an aimless sandbox, one which leads to some very cool songs, and others there's no chance we'll remember once we're eight albums deep into Nilüfer Yanya's career.
