(2018) Yazan - Hahaha
Review:
Growing up in New York City during the ’80s as the son of Palestinian refugees, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Yazan absorbed peace and justice as his core values through conversations with his parents and education at the United Nations International School. He’s spent the last few years putting those ideas into music, deconstructing how first-world privilege works in his barebones folk and blues-rock songs. It’s a sound and ethos that fits in well with the idiosyncratic indie championed by Exploding in Sound Records, where Yazan has recently found a home alongside peers like Pile and Bad History Month. On Hahaha, his third album and first on the label, he begins looking outward, both by trying to engage outsiders and by questioning his own motives. Yazan has said he hopes to startle the complacent into action by shedding light on life problems big and small. It doesn’t get much smaller than “Cockroach,” a sweeping and boisterous rock ballad that trudges in time with his vocal trills. He wrote the song after a literal bug crawled through his practice space and someone squished it under their boot, leading to a moral spiral about the imbalance between the sanctity of human life and that of insects. Elsewhere, he calls out the false power of fear-mongering or, on the title track, laughs his way through shared anxiety while Pile drummer Kris Kuss takes a detour into ’60s psych. Even “The Star,” where Yazan imagines a world not driven by war, contradicts itself by employing heavy, Black Sabbath-inspired chords. For an album bent on spreading harmony and understanding, Hahaha feels delightfully manic. That restless ambition winds up blurring many of the album’s details. All nine songs on Hahaha offer stacks of robust guitar and a disorderly splendour that at its best recalls Tom Waits, but too often they wander off as if caught up in their own optimistic high. “Do You Wanna Go?” embraces the openly gaudy appeal of shredding, but keeps pushing a fun guitar solo after it’s already gone far enough. The intentionally plunky number “Forgiveness Begins” offers a friendly reminder about self-forgiveness, but clumsily waltzes through a key change and extended outro that adds little benefit to the message or the melody. This kind of emotional rambling fit on Yazan’s earlier records, where it was part of the complex blues-folk scenery. But when he tries to keep up with the rhythm-backed instrumentals of Hahaha, he ends up outshining his own points. Those stylistic differences are made obvious when Yazan pivots back to a more Americana-based approach: The message of “When I’m Gone,” about the importance of self-preservation when ending a relationship, is easy to absorb over its rolling roots guitar melody. The same is true for the love song “Ghost Blues,” a song so straightforward in its dark baritone storytelling that it could double as an homage to Bill Callahan. Though its humanistic messages occasionally get lost in feeling, Hahaha captures Yazan’s gutsy, freewheeling positivity, and does it with enough energy to make you want to believe in what he preaches. At this album’s best, he brings his humbling practice of peace and acceptance to life in a harsh, scruffy, and very human sound.
Tracklist:
01. Hahaha
02. Cockroach
03. The Star
04. Forgiveness Begins
05. When I'm Gone
06. Penetrate My Mind
07. Tiger
08. Do You Wanna Go
09. Ghost Blues
Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: indie-rock, psychedelic rock
Media Report:
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Bit rate: ~ 607-987 Kbps
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits