On their second album,
Gece,
Altin Gün perfected their updated version of the Turkish psychedelia of the late '60s/early '70s. The group of musicians from Holland and Turkey gave familiar Turkish folk songs a gleaming upgrade that combined bouncy rhythms with soaring electric saz lines, heartfelt vocals, and an overall feel of psychedelic warmth that was at once comforting and thrillingly new. Not content to repeat themselves, the band altered the approach and sound on 2021's
Yol in a couple important ways. Thanks to the global pandemic, they weren't able to work together in a studio and instead traded ideas over email and shared files. As they sent demos around, more and more synths and drum machines ended up in use, and the feel of the record began to shift from the joyous explosion of sound of past albums to something more subdued and synth pop influenced. Many of the songs are built on icy keys instead of nimble basslines, a steady drum machine pulse takes the place of more flamboyant drumming, and there is a glossy sheen that coats the production like a plastic cover over a comfortably worn sofa. It's a little shocking the first time "Ordunun Dereleri" -- which has all the rain-streaked windshield melancholy of
Chromatics -- plays, and a little disquieting how songs like "Kesik Çayir" or "Kara Toprak" replace the beating heart of a live band with something more machine-driven. Even tracks with some familiar psychedelic strut, like "Sevda Olmasaydi" or "Hey Nari," have melancholy synths in the background bringing them down a notch emotionally. Considering the circumstances of the record and the general state of the world, it's not too surprising that the record is a little more gloomy than the buoyant
Gece was. The important thing here is that the band manage to pull off the adjustments very well and prove just as adept at tugging on heartstrings as they were at floating the listener on a cloud of joy. Also, it's not all bummer tunes. The disco-fied "Maçka Yollari" is a perfectly percolating dancefloor filler with some whiplash-fast saz riffing, "Yekte" is a rumbling jam that wouldn't have been out of place on
Gece, and "Yüce Dağ Başında"'s bubbling electro-pop conjures up a vision of
Madonna on an Anatolian holiday. It's never easy for a group to follow up a record that made as big a splash as the Grammy-nominated
Gece did, and
Altin Gün do the right thing by keeping the core of their sound intact while subtly branching out in other directions. The synthy, downbeat direction they chose may not be the most thrilling option, but the band make it work thanks to their musical vision, the wonderful voices of
Merve Dasdemir and Erdinç Ecevit, and the fact that nobody else around is making music quite like this. ~ Tim Sendra