Yawn
Materialism

It can be a bit of a risk calling your band Yawn, what if the music you make is yawn-worthy? Add to that a fun fact that only about two minutes of the album has written down chord changes, does that mean that the rest of the album is improvised? What if it is incoherent? So, either they like to put some pressure onto themselves or they don’t really think of such things, as they are Norwegians it isn’t that hard to imagine that they don’t really understand – in Sweden there is a bit of a view that Norwegians are stupid, and from my experience with Norwegians (living only about 200 km from the border) it isn’t an unfounded view. But they do have some excellent progressive bands, and this seems to be a progressive band, so how about Yawn’s debut album Materialism?

It is instrumental and in the kind of groove, mathcore, technical sort of style. Cool artwork by the way. The album itself is a bit static, many times a little slow, but also technical and heavy, progressive as well, at least in terms of the norm for the progressive. It also feels a bit haphazard and doesn’t have a natural progression from start to end, something that can make it a little tiresome to listen to. The sound is good, but far from extraordinary. And the same can be said about several things when it comes to this album, it fails to stand out or captivate.

I don’t think this album can be seen as much other than a Yawn, and a haphazard one at that. It feels like they improvise and improvise badly when they create the songs. There is nothing that really stands out or captivate my attention – there are some nice passages that feels borrowed from something by Steve Hackett, but otherwise there is mostly just white noise. Background stuff at best, but I don’t really feel like listening to this album at all, never.

This album seems like fragments loosely put together into something that might resemble an album, it doesn’t have the magic of a great album or the solidity of an average one. Mostly it is a yawn, a quite tiresome creation. Perhaps if they write down more than two minutes they might actually make 35 minutes of worthwhile music, but unless you like to yawn or just has a Materialistic need to get everything in existence Materialism is an album you can do without.

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