Young Prisms | In Between
Young Prisms "Sugar" from kay kanine on Vimeo.
It’s hard not to cop out and say this band sounds like a 21st century My Bloody Valentine. Picture nondescript lyrics, bittersweet melodies sung in hazy, indifferent voices, over simple, catchy chord progressions. Then imagine this combination blurred by layers upon layers of subtly massive, whirring guitar distortion, so much so that the entire album becomes a murky mirage of formless emotion transmuted through pure sound.
While many current alternative musicians are still looking back to the music of the 1980s for inspiration, this group of young prisms (prisms: objects which filter existing light into new images) are pushing music forward in its backwards-looking tendencies. Why disco when you can have shoegaze? Why focus on the party’s apparent music rather than the partiers’ ephemeral mental states? Why make beats when instead you can create a slow-motion sonic orgasm?
RIYL: My Bloody Valentine, (calm) Smashing Pumpkins, Yuck (and anyone they sound like), Real Estate, euphoria
By Jesse Paller, “We Like Music,” Wednesdays biweekly 10 p.m.-MIDNIGHT
Yellow Ostrich | Strange Land
Sophomore slumps are a common truism in the music industry. Bands typically have their whole lives to create the material for their first record and only about a year for their second. Yellow Ostrich proves this wrong by delivering on the same appealing qualities on their follow-up that made their first record so great.
The extensive vocal layering of that first full-length is mostly gone now, but the lack of what seemed like a driving force in the past allows the band’s true lead voice to drop its previous disguises and simply be.
Of course, most of Yellow Ostrich’s best elements remain intact. The lyrics still remain almost childish in their honesty and naïveté, but that quality remains endearing as opposed to groan-inducing. The band’s commitment to creative instrumental arrangement also stayed intact through fresh song crafting, as shown by the album’s frequent featuring of trumpets, nontraditional percussion and silence as a means of emphasis.
Strange Land is a blunt, catchy vehicle for innocence whose charm is tough not to adore.
RIYL: Local Natives, Freelance Whales
by Spencer Swan, “TRAVELING WEST ON SWANS,” MONDAYS 6 P.M.-8 P.M.
Fun. | Some Nights
Moderately successful pop-punk artists’ obsession with Queen is understandable, as the genre itself is prone to over-dramatization and self-aggrandizement. The Queen path is a fairly natural transition to musical and literal “maturity.”
Fun. is the most recent band to fall victim to the “Black Parade Syndrome.” Lead songwriter Nate Ruess attempts to weave a whole mess of influences together to create a truly bizarre, but not terrible, amalgamation of wailing guitar solos, All Time Low-esque auto-tune, ’80s casiotone synths, “Drumline” samples and soaring three-part harmonies.
The album is structurally interesting at best and overproduced and over-thought at worst, with some truly Fun. — it was impossible not to make that joke at least once — melodies laced into songs that have a few too many layers between the listener and the band. And while the intimacy of Ruess’s “Dog Problems” is lost, “Some Nights” is certainly catchy. It’s up to you whether you can handle the whirlwind barrage of influences.
RIYL: the Format, Panic! At the Disco, musical theater
By Maxwell Tani, “Baroqueback Mountain,” Fridays midnight-2 a.m.
