Yves Malone – Beyond the Before (Album Review)

Yves Malone
Beyond the Before
Never Anything Recs

Links: Official Site | Bandcamp

Yves Malone is at it again, this time skipping through time and space to end up with a futuristic soundtrack that is an ambient-synth delicacy. Beyond the Before takes us on a synthetic journey to an analog future. Fueled on a steady diet of krautrock and 1970s synth technology, the album pushes Malone’s creative edge beyond dimension.

Beyond the Before moves like library music. “The Light Inside Has Broken But We Still Work” smells of burnt ionization. It’s a song that exploits the tintiness of the note and pushes it with suspense. The mood is about as Carpenter as Malone will get. Think “Arnold Tongue” like waking up from a Tangerine Dream slumber to immerse yourself in a technicolor habitat. The sparkles of vintage synths and effects swirling about, this song gets to the core of Malone’s accomplishment. It’s there to capture ambient moods and push the minds cosmic intrigue beyond simple perception. It’s Jean Painlevé in outer space.

“Narco Monday” is cop funk for the lethargic. A soundtrack for any action hero combing the streets for that next big break, only to end up reflecting on their own personal brokenness. Malone has a theme, but his set of rules are minimal in convention. It opens his music up to a diversity that turns this album into an interstellar travelogue.

I love how Malone contorts mood and bends time out of an old sound without sacrificing the elements of his current momentum. Here we have Malone’s more respectable work to the art. He has done the research and waged war with technology. What he ended up was an archaeological foundation built on timeless pieces. And with that, Beyond The Before is an album trapped in a multi-dimensional framework that does nothing more than excite the senses. Bravo for such an electronic statement.

Yves Malone – Narco Monday