Yppah - You Are Beautiful At All Times

Yppah's debut delightfully flaunts the conventions of breakbeat, employing static-laden, fuzzed out walls of psychedelic guitar, music-box melodies that loop in a dreamlike way, and treble-filled, sibilant drums. Yppah moulds convincing rhythms and uplifting songs, but also achieves a unity of sound and texture that make 'You Are Beautiful...' a cohesive and appealing album, timeless in its feel. His background as a DJ and creator of bootlegs has perhaps given him a feel for what works on the dancefloor, but on the propulsive folk-rave of I'll Hit The Breaks, and the indie-meets-Orbital beauty of Again With Subtitles, Yppah's compositions are more than the sum of their parts. The net effect is something like listening to an old Orb album - an intriguing and distinctive sonic world appears, with familiar echoes that surface and disappear in subtle washes of electronic fuzz. A unique, trippy, and all too brief debut. [Bram Gieben]