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Nihaihayat (2013) is the fourth full-length album to be released by Turkish black metal act Yayla. A one man act consisting of Emir Toğrul, who performs the vocals, guitars, bass and keyboards, as well as programming the drums, Yayla is quickly becoming apparent as quite the productive act since the first album, Ruhizolasyon, was released as recently as 2011.
Nihaihayat is my first encountered with Yayla, and unfortunately it’s one of those albums which has given me cause to seriously consider making it my last. While some artists can pull off being extra productive, others seem to spread their good ideas to thin and just drop sub-par album after sub-par album. Having not heard them I cannot comment on the quality of the previous three releases by Yayla, but Nihaihayat suggests to me that the act is among the latter cases, despite not being anyway near as productive as acts like Senmuth or Nadja.
The music here mostly fits within the atmospheric black metal vein and I draw instant comparisons to acts like Burzum due to Yayla’s inclusion to fully ambient pieces. The album kicks off with such a track, Integumental Grasp and it honestly isn’t too bad. But after this, when the metal finally kicks in with Through the Sigil of Hate, things just fall apart. Yayla’s take on black metal is some of the most lo-fi I have ever encountered. So raw and bad are the production values that very little aspects about the music on the album can be discerned. The vocals are indistinguishable and can very rarely even be heard, the music repetitive to the point of being beyond a joke, something with is heightened by excessive song lengths exceeding the ten minute mark, resulting in one big, messy and fuzzy haze that is only vaguely recognisable as music at all. It has a very slight atmospheric quality to it, but it’s not an atmosphere I want to immerse myself in the way I want to do with a good Fen, Wodensthrone or Falls of Rauros album.
Another ambient piece, In Senility, closes the album, but it’s too late by this stage to offer any real sort of redemption for Nihaihayat. This is after all supposed to be a black metal album, and on that score it just happens to be one of the worst I have ever heard. A couple of half decent ambient tracks do not reflect the overall quality of a metal album. They do save Nihaihayat from an absolutely bottom tier rating, but does that mean I can recommend it even a little? Nope, not really. If Emir Toğrul turned Yayla into a pure ambient project then there may be some hope for his music, but as it stands I think I’ll struggle to find a weaker album this year if I’m brutally honest.
15/100
(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven: http://metaltube.freeforums.org/yayla-nihaihayat-t3005.html)