SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: YAEJI – WITH A HAMMER

Yaeji
With A Hammer
XL Recordings

On a debut album that was heavily-anticipated by the global electronic scene, Yaeji’s sound manifests as an ocean of ideas, each tide brimming with intriguing influences and provoking artistic choices. The central themes of rage and identity should be accompanied by an appreciation of the album as a beautifully-curated gallery. In here, we are taken on a 43-mins whistle-stop tour around all the jazz (“I’ll Remember For Me, I’ll Remember For You”), ambient (‘1 Thing To Smash’), industrial techno (“Michin”) and glitchy electronica that has been experimented with during her career thus  far.

On “Submerge FM”, Yaeji soothingly declares ‘we’re all a part of one’. She presides over a clash between traditional flutes and a ridiculously catchy house beat, emulating the complications between the roots of music and the technological landscape it evolves within. It perfectly opens the album’s expression of conflict and change, with vocals quickly becoming more jarring and surrealistic in the ensuing track “For Granted” – part of the song’s maxim of expecting the unexpected. On tracks like “Fever” and “With A Hammer”, she presents resounding poems of self-realisation, now an artist inventively and introspectively critiquing the people we are becoming. Though coherence is sometimes sacrificed to entertain the sheer diversity of sound, Yaeji nevertheless displays the rare ability to represent such a broad expanse of artists and subgenres with the utmost respect and skill – so, perhaps, the gravity of an album format was a necessary fundamental for each song’s success.

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