Label: Silber Records
Released: September 2015
Hiroshi Sugimoto took a lot of blurry photographs. Some are hauntingly beautiful and others just evade my understanding. It’s hard to say that the latter fails, so much as it seems that I have failed. So it is with Yellow6’s “photographs” as well. The stated goal of No Memories, Just Photographs is to express the dying of memories, of history, with the people who lived it and the images left behind. The loss of clarity to time and the Eternal Footman is deconstructed and reconstructed in sparse, vague guitar arrangements that are surely the very same events only viewed quite differently. This deconstruction/reconstruction process, like Sugimoto’s blurred lens, is a difficult treatment of a subject we likely fail to fully understand, but that should not be a crticism of the work itself. The album’s most connected song, the sprawling 20 minute “Beat Them at Their Own Game,” comes nearest into focus with subtle hints of blues/jazz not completely disconnected from their roots, but the rest for all of its blurriness, gives new perspective on both our time and the past.