Yakuza
Transmutations

I was quite hesitant when rumors started circulating about a new Yakuza album a year after Samsara. These types of operations, speaking from the experiences of a "burned" listener, always seemed like leftovers from the previous album sessions, with a really pronounced sense of deja-vu that left no room for criticism.

The Chicago Quartet, however, surprises by having cut down to the bone and at the same time enhanced the more violent parts and letting the jazzy/expanded take a clear lead for a stylistic maturity that pleases; as with "Egocide", a track also enjoyed ahead of the album's release, which at first seems like a variation on the theme of "Glory Hole", a track from the previous work, but goes on weaving unusual and very interesting guitar and sax interplay. Also excellent is "Perception Management", where to the faint initial solo, all the other elements are gradually added to produce a martial and spasmodic finale. Besides the just mentioned song, it must be said that the entire final triptych is a single original vein: "Black Market Liver" divides with partitions of a certain hectic death style, the fantastic arpeggio with the sax, and the psychedelic vein. Even "Zombie", with its muffled but violent impulses, sways with its peculiar motion, first with subdued intensity and then with a violent "collision", towards original and enjoyable experimentation shores.

And the rest? Well, our guys have wisely concentrated pearls of violence into tracks that alternate the more experimental ones and don’t last over about three and a half minutes. Certainly noteworthy is "Congestive Art Failure", with its enchanted finale given by the ethereal guitar, and the schizophrenic "Praying for Asteroids", with echoes of Brutal and a multitude of rhythm changes, noises, and other amenities all concentrated in just under three minutes three. However, flaws do exist, it's not all roses and flowers: the deja vu senses are indeed there (the opener "Meat Curtains" above all, truly a remnant of Samsara and the sulphureous "Blinding", curious but inconclusive) and the voice, which overall remains monotonous as in the previous work.

Transmutations, however, hits the mark in its longer and more experimental episodes, another good side of the coin that started showing good results last year. Original.