Faded Photographs is the most song-centric album Yagya, the project of Icelander Aðalsteinn Guðmundsson, has released since The Inescapable Decay of My Heart ten years ago. The present reviewer, impressed by earlier works like the luminous Rigning, has always categorized him an ambient instrumentalist with a subtle dub sensibility, if one of the most talented. As this very pretty album proves, Yagya is also a fine crafter of dreamy pop songs wending their way along a narrative arc within that musical template.
The album unfolds as dialogue, one conducted by four singers – Americans Benoit Pioulard and Saint Sinner, Bandreas (cannot trace her biography; the liner notes refer to her as “mysterious”) and Guðmundsson himself, brushing up against each other gently as weeping willow branches in a breeze. The vocals, breathy, silky, the dubby bass and cushy beats, the tenor saxophone of Óskar Guðjónsson – everything is soft and warm, despite there being six feet of snow outside. It is an exchange of grown-up truths about teenage melancholy, where there are no hard boundaries, but rather the empathetic absorption of vulnerabilities. Faded Photographs is a wistful and semisweet story about the things “we left unsaid.” And it comes with a comic book’s worth of endearing drawings by Richard Ortiz.
Stephen Fruitman
Avant Music News 