Valscharuhn - Ykcowrebbaj
Review by Lusitano
I'm not familiar with any Valscharuhn release and I'm going blind into this album. Ykcowrebbaj is a very strange album and the name will surely grab your attention right away, Ykcowrebbaj... What could it mean? It doesn't take a genius to notice that it's the word Jabberwocky reversed. Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about killing a creature named "Jabberwock". It's considered one of the greatest English nonsense poems, and if you ever have the pleasure of reading it, you'll certainly understand why it's called nonsense. I believe the name Ykcowrebbaj was used quite smartly to give the idea of gibberish and drivel, in the sense that the structure of the album is but a string of melodies and chords with no destiny or home. Ykcowrebbaj was created to house those loose ideas, and segments and it does an amazing job at doing so.
"Nonsense albums" will always be dependent on the strength of melodies and how everything is stitched together, and that's where Valscharuhn does such a phenomenal job. Not only is the material consistently solid, it's also extremely well-paced and arranged in a way that it never gets boring. This is the sound of the classical dungeon synth with an atypical and experimental nature, and I'll be damned if the improvisational tone and mistakes don't add to the darkened charm of the album. However, the big surprise here, the one that makes me love this album so much, is the gritty dungeon melodies! To consider that this is an improvisational album made with leftover ideas, one can only wonder how the "more serious" albums sound like.
Personally, I've always found some of that early dungeon synth to be excessively repetitive and monotonous, and I've always gravitated towards dungeon synth that loses some of that tiresome repetition in favor of variety and experimental ideas. In Ykcowrebbaj, Valscharuhn is not afraid to create an album that takes you on an unpredictable journey, on a musical voyage that doesn't make much sense. Like I said, individual ideas stitched together. However, Valscharuhn does it in a way that ensures the music never grows stale. When you think the melody is going to settle, a twist happens, a beat enters, dynamics kick in, moods shift, and so on. That's how this song runs, twists at any moment that will actually surprise you, and even when something is repeating a bit too much, it will soon start to distort as the artist begins to tinker with the properties of the synth, giving it new life.
Ykcowrebbaj is a very refreshing surprise to me and it represents the ideal nature of dungeon synth, dark and mysterious, unpredictable and brave, never getting stuck in monotonous chord loops, never afraid to try something else. If you're looking for dungeon synth that stays true to its roots, but also does something different, look no further than Valscharuhn's Ykcowrebbaj.
