Mert Yıldız has been making music in the Turkish Underground Music scene for 20 years, releasing demos and albums with numerous bands such as the Industrial Metal "Black Front", Synthwave "The Hollow Dolly", Doom Metal "Vassago", the Loner Folk of "Rhythm 0", Post-Punk "Dead Man’s Dream" and the Dark Electronic "Dahakara".
Rain To Rust is the culmination of these 20 years experience and the new album "Flowers of Doubt" demonstrates how he has used this valuable time and experience, which is apparent throughout all eight of the tracks on the album. It's a collection of nostalgic sounding Post Punk songs that are impressive in their own right but even more so when you consider that Mert is the producer, the writer and the sole performer on the album. Even the cover artwork are his own 35 mm black and white photos.
Mert goes back to the beginnings of British Post Punk music and follows the footsteps of Singer-Songwriter heroes of the past, such as Adrian Borland (The Sound), Ian Curtis (Joy Division), Mark E. Smith (The Fall) and Andrew Eldritch (The Sisters Of Mercy.) That means Rain To Rust’s music is a product of substance-over-style thinking that feeds upon vast literary and non-literary references and tries to touch the darkest corners of the human psyche.
“Flowers Of Doubt” is a collection of 8 songs that do not have a traditional storyline but are linked morally and thematically. Every song on the album revolve around the themes of fear and dependence, how fear brings a need for dependence and dependence consequently breeds more fear, eventually pushing the human being into a shell of personal dogmas and psychological routines that he/she will probably end up dying within.
Overall, “Flowers Of Doubt” is a dark, confrontational and challenging record that exists in an alternate timeline where Post-Punk always remained an experimental, literate and deeply personal music and never became a fashionable caricature full of Peter Murphy circa 1982 impersonators. It is an album that is a complete, coherent artistic statement from its sound to its visual presentation and not a random collection of songs.
Rain To Rust will spend the next few months taking its music to the stage (with Erhan Sazlı from Saints N Sinners and Dead Man’s Dream filling on bass guitar duties) and working on the second full-length album for a late 2020 release.
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