Yol is the third album by Turkish by way of Amsterdam sextet, Altin Gün. They achieved a shocking (and well deserved) amount of attention from mainstream music publications following the Grammy nomination of their 2019 album Gece. Yol is that album's follow-up, and it's a discernable departure. Altin Gün's earlier work was a steady homage to the blend of psychedelic pop and Turkish folk that commingled like stewed okra and tomatoes during the '60s and '70s. Yol updates their sound by unlocking the potential affordances that lay in the future facilitating sounds of '80s synth-pop and '70s experimental disco. New wave, and adjacent experimentations in dance and pop, are not without their precedent in the music of the Anatolian peninsula, but this new aesthetic, once embraced, does unlock a frictionless series of levers and triggers within the Altin Gün, a chain-reaction that opens the band up like a freshly solved puzzle box. "Ordunun Dereleri," with its leaking trickle of synths, and firm but permeable bass lines, sounds like it is playing during a perpetual rainstorm, one that is slowly drowning a Mediterranean city in what feels like god's tears. "Yüce Dağ Başında" takes a diamond-dusted disco groove and twists it around a sultry and calmly seductive pop melody like python imitating a feather boa as its curls and constricts around your bicep and over your shoulder. "Kesik Çayır" introduces some surprising but convincing tropical elements with a smooth South American reminiscent melody that rolls off broad bass hooks and warm, misty synths, like water running in a cascade between plants by flowing down the midrib of their leaves. Of course, if all you are looking for is some Turkish funk to bob your head to while wearing a pair of impossibly dark sunglasses, you can skip head to "Sevda Olmasaydı" or "Maçka Yolları" and then forget the rest of your day. Yol is so satisfying that there may need to be an intervention staged to get me to listen to anything else this week. Of course, if any of the said interveners hear the record themselves, they may lose their nerve and opt to throw an all-day dance party instead.
You can get a copy of Altin Gün's Yol from ATO Records here.
