My Review: Peter Yates - You Never Know What You Might Find

 

Peter Yates - You Never Know What You Might Find

Like a shock that revitalises the circuits of understanding, here we are in a crepuscular full of (slow) pulses, to specify the description and absorption of all that nature generates, revealed through sonic balms that surround and disarm indifference.

Shall we call it music? It would seem reductive.

We are in front of a form of discipline that educates in the shedding and abandonment of listening clichés that are ill-suited to what this art should defend: uniqueness, seriousness, the intention to create mental shoots that open the pores of thoughts.

Peter Yates returns, and it is the confirmation of a level of class that is difficult for current musicians and authors to reach. It reaffirms the ability to use filters, to sift out the useless and abandon it, to approach, divinely, the study of sound, showing dilations, light but perfectly rounded echoes, reverberations that disinfect the din and make it obedient to this analysis that is completed by becoming a perfectly successful surgical operation.

The gaze takes off from the rarefied psychedelia, like a sigh that investigates and reflects and brings the contents into the hourglass of time, approaching an ambient music that wants to contain itself, to not be a goblet of Italian sparkling wine but still a simple but very precious bunch, almost insecure but certainly respectful of the greatness it is interested in. Peter slows down, bends over, blends in and leaves old glorious moments in an abandoned garage: as a solo musician, he is clearly better, more capable of expressing concepts and calibrating a genius that has never been recognised before. The intensity he achieves has no need of the albeit remarkable greatness of that band that Old Scribe will never cease to love.

But here we find ourselves in a spell, where delicacy, purity, candour and respect lead these fourteen tracks down an avenue that seems to embrace the trees, the houses, the motions of a confused existence. The ideas here are clear and one can smell the scent of modesty that does not celebrate but preserves one's inner growth. 

Music, then, that is a kinematic, sensorial, solar flow in the foam of a still dormant light: it takes apparent arpeggios in the form of delightful lullabies and strings in sinuous paintings to fly over the zone of living and make it a wise springtime ecstasy...

We seem to hear the epic blues of ancient trajectories disguised as a mass that has yet to decide whether to be secular or sacred. But one breathes spirituality, devotion to silence with notes that become conscious ramifications, having the gift of thickening the awareness of earthly things.

It revolves around small chord sequences, searching for the epicentre, then transporting it to a terrace, where it can be noticed by souls in flight.

It is not an album for everyone and it is a great joy: sometimes it can be a great victory not to be part of a mass, especially the current one that ignores and does not recognise the purity of this increasingly raped and certainly misused art. Yates enters into the sounds of a kitchen, into the entrance of a house, he uses small stratagems to hypnotise, like a session in which catharsis is not the objective. It is the feeling of defeated loneliness as these compositions alert the senses and scatter them on a day when time spent listening to this work is the first form of pride, knowing that tales and fairy tales are sometimes the appetiser of a reality that dares to resemble them.

An album that is only apparently instrumental because, if you pay attention, these compositions continually translate the flow of thoughts that dwells in the mind of this incredible artist: being able to grasp the different aspects of language, starting from silence and ending with the voice of the instruments, becomes a beautiful example of a new communication.

When the precious friendship that binds him to Jo Beth Young decides to show itself (Beside), then we find ourselves with different voices side by side, in a medieval dance with annexed electronic flows, between patterns, dreamy guitars and screeching that await the voice of the singer, here struggling with a text written in her own hand and painted on the basis of this hourglass of time that leads her register to rise in flight, to disperse in the clouds...

Throughout the album, moral inclinations coexist, diamonds kept hidden by kilometre-long guitar plays that simplify the relationship with ideas: a short path that, however, leads far away, denying the song form to use, instead, a modality that practices rhetoric, scouring and abandonment of what seduces the English artist. The result is the warm smoke of a bundle of wood that does not burn but warms with respect, standing out, taking refuge in a microcosm of goblins and spirits who find the perfect hammock in which to recover from their labours, deep, highly professional and certainly therapeutic ensemble…

Album of the month

March 2025

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

5 Marzo 2025

https://peteryates.bandcamp.com/album/you-never-know-what-you-might-find