Album Review: Olden Yolk Debut To Reclaim The Power of Identity
To reclaim your identity, as a person, is not easy because it means you have to claim your sufferings. Every individual is divided by their triumphs and their traumas, and taking up your human history means learning how to combine both to create a better person. Whether you are trying to reclaim you gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, or even religious identity, you are bound to find and experience stories of prejudice and power. Olden Yolk use their debut to bring such stories to life.
With melodies that roll like newsreels, Olden Yolk pack their lyrics with headlining poeticism. They grab your attention in songs such as, “Aria”, “Common Ground”, and “Vital Sign” to show how unrest either reveals your strength or lack of it. Now more than ever, people are being challenged to have a moral voice, and not be reliant on the boldness of those who show theirs. With equality and social justice feeling more threatened than ever, Olden Yolk use songs like, “Espirit De Corps” and “Cut To The Quick”, the latter about the Stonewall Riots, to show humanity is defined by a war between those whom are arrogant enough to tell others how to live, and the others who say “OH, HELL NO!”
Olden Yolk dig and sprout their debut with an importance that can be felt in its motorik rhythms and dystopian melodies. You feel like you are making a film project in an abandoned, industrial city when you hear the instrumentals of “Gamblers On A Dime” and “Hen’s Teeth”. You just imagine a group of youth packed into a car, and getting out to dance, investigate, dream, and look at a world that has been left. They glare and wonder if those who came before them dreamt this was their after. In some ways, that is how it feels when you look back at the community of people that shared your identity, and think about the lives they held, the feelings they fought, and the dreams they shunned because of it.
As songwriters, vocalists, and multi-instrumentalists Shane Butler (of Quilt) and Caity Shaffer harmonize their voices to form a luminous narrator that radiates through humanity’s contrasting sentiments. Their cozy vocals sing to the idea that identity is based on the seesawing sentiments of both finding love and feeling unworthy of it. It is an unexpectedly basic, but poignant cause that they cultivate through chords that shatter, soil, and sink their hooks as their verses discuss the need for self-repair. It is a good juxtaposition, and a good, self-titled debut. Olden Yolk Comes Out February 23: Click Here For More Information.
