Review: Yvette Young & Covet
This is a review of Yvette Young and her band Covet. If you’re not familiar with Yvette Young and her band Covet, I’m not entirely sure what to tell you. Internet… better.
Yvette is a musician who specializes in guitar. Her music, often solo, but sometimes in collaboration with her band, Covet, is modern instrumental music that echoes the finest pieces from the old Candyrat records style. Her songs intricate, fast-paced, peaceful and melodic songs would fit perfectly into any jRPG soundtrack, so if you’ve found yourself on this site, you’re sure to be into what she’s doing.
It’s hard to accurately describe her genre to someone who hasn’t been introduced to her sound. It’s modern. It’s rock. It’s classical. It’s fusion. You could just as easily imagine her pieces being played in a recital setting in an erudite concert hall as you could in a busted up venue. For every artist making highly produced radio friendly pop that could be (and often is) written by an AI, Yvette is making soulful performance pieces that put you in awe not only of the composition but also of the performance difficulty.
In other words, it’s not only impressive to hear, it’s impressive to watch, like watching someone play nightmare difficulty Guitar Hero. Except, y’know, more impressive since it’s nightmare difficulty actual guitar and piano. As a random digression, a lot of people wonder if AI can replace human artists, and I think juxtaposing what Yvette does with what modern pop singers do provides the answer: when it comes to music production — yes, absolutely. When it comes to this kind of instrumentality, composition and performance that communicates the sound of the human soul: no. Art is, at its heart, communication through the soul and what AI lacks is not technical ability; it’s the ghost in the machine that desires to communicate.
Back on track, Yvette almost certainly has a large amount of influence from video game soundtracks. You can hear the “Chrono Cross” influence in a variety of her songs, as well as the soulful piano concertos that were so popular among jRPGs in the PS1 era when jazz fusion bands like Casiopeia and T-Square worked on soundtracks alongside full orchestras. Long before the Western approach of “generic diegetic ambiance” become the dominant approach to sound design.
Here are some song recommendations for you for Yvette Young: Shibuya, Glimmer, Yearn. You should be able to take it from there.
That about covers it for my review of Yvette Young. Be sure to check out the Music Section for more content like this.
