#tiny pause

Yppah - Tiny Pause

Houston native Jose Luis Corrales Jr. releases his newest album with his now full band under their performing name Yppah, entitled Tiny Pause. Expressing his thoughts and feelings with modular synthesizers and samplers rather than vocals, Corrales creates a mesmerizing blend of electronic music that generates a dream-like vision of cruising down a dimly lit street in California, where he currently resides. Outfitted with a full band, this album has a wildly advantageous full sound that playfully dances between it’s electronic and traditional instruments, including live drums, guitar and bass.  

Replicating the style of music that past greats like Boards of Canada, 65daysofstatic and Blockhead have so well articulated, Yppah isn’t creating anything ground-breaking, however he seems to be creating what he wants, something important and lacking in the music industry today. Having claimed to have grown up on ‘equal parts hip-hop and My Bloody Valentine’, Corrales seems to wear his influences on his sleeve, not afraid for the comparisons that people will be willing to make, because he seamlessly manages to blend genres together, leaving a strong emotive warmth that couldn’t be put to words.

Songs like “Neighborhoods” and “Owl Beach II” are centered around an off-time loop that succumbs to layers of guitar, synthesizers and drums to blend into some of the most pleasant sounding instrumental music I’ve heard in the past few years. On “Neighborhoods” a child’s voice fades in and out, pairing with the loop that can cause any listener to feel nostalgic of simpler times, even if for a few seconds. As the tempo increases, it never gains a sense of urgency, but still cradles the listener along the way with various bell and chime dings that showcase the true beauty of simplicity.

‘Coastal Cities’ is one of the biggest highlights of the album, and a wonderful way to close it out as well. Midway it explodes with an astonishing use of strings and horns; something about it is so fun yet well articulated, with the second half picking up and constantly implementing layers of guitar, bass and glitch-drums that it had me playing the track over and over again.

I would say one of the greatest things about artists like Yppah and the liking is the amount of accessibility they can have, yet still remain experimental and complex. I would easily recommend this album to anyone while they were doing homework, or trying to sleep – however, when you truly sit down and listen to Tiny Pause it manages to paint you a non-verbal portrait of Corrales’s mind – one that’s unique, emotional and captivating.

The biggest downfall of this album is as previously mentioned, there’s nothing that hasn’t been done before on this album, although Tiny Pause does maintain a diverse range of genre influences, such as shoegaze and post-rock. Realistically, good originality is extremely hard for music in this day and age especially when it comes to electronic music, where there’s countless experimental ‘noise’ bands that would sound better at the bottom of a landfill. So at the very least, Yppah isn’t making an attempt to grasp at something that isn’t there and rather clings onto the great qualities of its genre and impresses a great amount.

6.7/10