Nilüfer Yanya
Painless

THE REVIEW

I want to take the cityscape on the cover as an exemplary image of the album, like an old neighborhood that has undergone a brutal gentrification.

Old and new, ancient and modern, slow and fast, acoustic and electric, this is what I hear in this record. It's like walking down a street with a small low building, without an elevator, followed by a glass skyscraper, and so on, alternating. Nilüfer Yanya's warm, low voice, which almost seems like a strong whisper, leads us by the hand on this brisk walk, because there's not much time, the rhythms are frenetic at first, then relax later, tired, and the guitar arpeggios are sparse and metallic. Meanwhile, the background is filled with reverberated sounds that gently caress the eardrums and never leave you. The drums seem like a mix between acoustic and drum machine with some distortion effects, and the bass is always beautifully present, especially in the breaks where it disappears and then reappears. And I very much like when they play with bass dynamics, creating waves during the listening that keep your interest alive.

"Midnight Sun" is the track that best summarizes the sensations I've tried to describe, an arpeggio that initially somehow reminds me of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes" but more indie and less "jazz" and with a beautifully powerful and tar-like ending, like the road we're traveling.

There's a lot of guitar work in this record, almost always clean or with a slight crunch without ever becoming intrusive, well-calibrated, I could say "Painless", without pain, I feel I could play them myself without frustration, easy but not trivial. And I hear a lot of work in the vocals as well, with which they play well, often doubling and having fun with the stereo effect (left/right).

"Painless" is, in my opinion, one of the best albums of this just passed 2022, an album with a dual soul, as I said before, old and new, slow and fast. But also an indie that winks at soul and jazz without pretending to be so.