You Are Beautiful At All Times

Album Review

Texan Joe Corrales' striking debut as Yppah is a lush, beautiful mix of melancholic electronica, shoegazer melodies, breakbeat drum samples, hip-hop atmosphere, and somber, sometimes jazzy guitar lines. These dissimilar elements together might suggest a mess, but Yppah brings everything to a boil to form exotic soundscapes that both reward close listening and work as fine background scores for modern life. With haunting, powerful songs like "Almost in That Category" and the tender yet ominous "In Two, the Weakly," Yppah displays production skills and artful arranging on par with genre giants like Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin, and µ-Ziq. Yppah has more in common with the latter, in that there's more of a sense of emotion rather than frivolity in the melodies. That he implements textures from post-rock, fractured shoegazer rock, and hip-hop while never straying into these genres outright is quite a feat. "Longtime" is reminiscent of glitch artists like Matmos and actually puts them to shame in that it's just as experimental, but a hundred times more listenable. You Are Beautiful at All Times is a cohesive excursion into moody electronica that adds an air of freshness to a genre that sometimes gets quite stale and sterile.