The music of Young People whisks you away and lands you not in Oz but back somewhere in Kansas with Toto once again. The storms and calm that Katie Eastburn and Jarrett Silberman bring forth is something somehow removed and never crystal clear, about the weather of life. The songs are like hymns and plaintive yet bristling emotion. Their sound is full of intriguing paradox — traditional like folk tunes and avant-garde like noise rock, a minimalism that is stark but recalls vast plains.
Young People, with the amicable departure of band-mate Jeff Rosenberg, has followed up their intriguing album War Prayers with this, their third full-length, All At Once. This new album does depart from past full-lengths, most noticeably with the addition of the piano, adding an interesting dimension to the various former configurations of vocal, drums, and guitar. The piano can anchor that open sound, with an ability to create momentum and entangle with other lines as it does with the guitar in most of “R&R”, but its sometimes refined and percussive nature can sound a bit out of place or plod in its dying chords when there’s nothing to bolster it.
The songs on All At Once were born in a new way as well. With Eastburn recently transplanted to the East Coast and Silberman still in LA, the album was pieced together from cross-country exchanges of demos, a muffled sound emerging from these originals recorded on a computer microphone and tape recorder. Unfortunately, something seems to have been lost in the trips between coasts: a sense of spontaneous joy, a sort of macabre rollicking dance that was on War Prayers and is only faintly present here, as in the brief glimpse of sunshine in part of “F”, which ironically has lyrics which begin, “Take heed of all the winter warning.”
But this is, in fact, a darker album, in sound, lyric, and outlook. Instead of sweeter rambles, there’s inexplicable noise and stranger harmonies. Eastburn’s voice, a creepy piano line, or guitar squalls each become disembodied at points. Lyrics and images haunt the album, with references to skies and storms and graves and angels. The brooding does not always work due to some lack of support or counterpoint against the music, which is normally what Young People does so fascinatingly in their ability to have a compelling song with just a vocal and drum beat.
The tracks are quite short, the whole work clocking in at about half an hour. Eastburn’s voice has grown lovelier and more haunting in its upper register, especially on “Dark Rainbow” where she floats over the excellently grim, bleak instruments. Tracks like the hypnotically droning “Forget,” the blood-warming “Slow Moving Storm” and others show that Young People don’t need a lot to get us in a strange place of dread and acceptance, don’t need a lot of sound to make an interesting album that stands out from the crowd, that clicking whatever slippers you have might take you to places familiar and unfamiliar at once. |