Yllwblly's poetically wrought alt folk testimony "Trigger" from the "Land Lover" album

"yllwblly flirts with genres"

It's funny how some songs quite instantly captivate you. This is the case with Yllwblly's beautifully cool, poetic track Trigger off of his ambitious debut album, "Land Lover" that recently dropped (Feb 7th 2020). From even the first delicate acoustic lines, linear then ascending then descending, there is a sadness, a tenderness that tugs at you. Yllwblly's voice feels complacently sad, words are painted with enui,  "Vision blurring, room is spinning, the rug you’re pulling out... From underneath my feet, the way you move...
Like you’re not there at all". The next line darkens the poetry as he sings, "Now I’m cold as a cadaver, waiting for the cut I’d have to wave a wand, abra cadabra... To have you how I want". 

As Yllwblly notes in his press notes, the self taught singer-songwriter / producer has been actually working on "Land Lover" for years. A cathartic artful exercise after "the collapse (in 2015) of a formative relationship". He would create the prose and melodies early in the morning before going to his office job. The result, the 13 track album is a stellar remembrance of sorts or as the artist puts it on his Bandcamp page: a half-memory, time portal, love letter

Yllwblly is the musical project of Mark Tseng-Putterman and the album "Land Lover" is available on following streaming services: Bandcamp, Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Music, Itunes

-Robb Donker Curtius

 

THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:

Birthing yllwblly’s debut album, Land Lover, was a long, stilted process. A self-taught singer, songwriter, and producer since his teen years, the record was born from the artist’s turn to creative ritual to document and cope with the collapse of a formative relationship in 2015. Written in the early mornings before an office job, Land Lover sees the then 23-year-old songwriter linger in the old wounds, bad dreams, and what-ifs of love and loss.

Though relegated by day jobs to notebooks and hard drives for the better part of four years, Land Lover, out February 2020, is brimming with fresh creative energy. Equal parts sparse and lush, brutal and beautiful, yllwblly flirts with genres—dream pop, folk, psychedelia—but refuses to linger too long in any one sound: “I Hope You’ll Get Yours in the End” jangles with the frenetic energy of The Mountain Goats, while “Trigger” begins as a stripped-down acoustic ballad before blooming into a psychedelic climax reminiscent of acts like Tame Impala.

What anchors the record is the artist’s ear for melody and a craftsman’s approach to songwriting, with arrangements that twist and evolve from raw minimalism to saturated dreamscapes. With over four years separating the record’s inception and completion, it bears the markings of an older, wiser artist returning to the scene of the past—exploring the contours of a relationship faded, as the artist sings on “Trigger,” like “a memory of a dream I half-forgot.”