This is the first in a series of semi-daily reviews as a project throughout the month of November.
Young Jesus is a seven-piece art rock group from Los Angeles, California whose sound takes influence from plenty of disparate groups and genres, from midwest emo and 90s alternative to post-punk and especially -rock. They’ve released five albums since their formation in 2009, the only one of which I have heard being Welcome to Conceptual Beach, their most recent record and the subject of this review.
Having not experienced or even heard of Young Jesus prior to deciding to review the record, it was an interesting experience discovering that I’m quite inclined towards many of the sounds employed by the band on this record. Being a fan of bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, American Football, and Matthew Good Band, I was essentially primed to enjoy the blend of sounds put forth on this record, and it’s been fun listening for those influences and similarities across these seven tracks.
The album’s 46-minute runtime is split fairly evenly into two sections: the opening five songs and two final 10+ minute monoliths. While the whole record dabbles and experiments with varying styles of music and different genres, it’s fairly indisputable that the wildest of this experimentation is reserved for the second half, with the opening track Faith being the only major exception. It opens with an incredibly cleanly-produced and layered drum track by Peter Martin, indicative of the overall production quality on the record, joined swiftly by a strangely autotuned and layered vocal performance by singer John Rossiter. It’s a quite jarring and attention-grabbing opening and while I love it in the context of the overall track, I can’t help but feel that it’s not quite indicative of the overall mood and style of the vocals across the record. After the introduction of some incredibly dissonant guitars and a very post-rock inspired pounding rhythm, however, we do get a taste of Rossiter’s more typical vocal styling, one that’s quite different from the Midwest Emo influences a lot of the instrumentals seem to hold, instead sounding more like a mix of Meat Loaf and Jeff Buckley, with almost muttered quiet verses contrasting with far more grandiose explosions in line with the instrumental crescendos at play.
The instrumentals the band puts down across this track and the record as a whole are where Conceptual Beach really shines to me, with crisp tones making up lines that alternate between reserved and lavish, and occasionally delving into complete disjointedness on tracks like Meditations and the final two tracks. The sheer number of members in the group, along with some very smart production, allows for an impressively broad range of sounds that never feels overindulgent, and doesn’t get to the point of being avant-garde, but keeps the pace of the record constantly moving despide not changing dramatically in speed or tone overall. While the whole record definitely plays in the realm of Emo and Post-Rock, the smooth jazz saxophone on Pattern Doubt, and the dense shoegaze distortion on (un)knowing show that the band isn’t afraid to push into unknown territory to fit their tune.
On Lark we’re greeted with a very free and disjointed intro, soft vocals play over disparate harmonics and drum hits, before finding its way into what becomes quite a beautiful riff. Unfortunately this riff leads into the weakest moment on the record for me, being the weird funky acoustic segments mired in whooping & hollering from what sounds like a crowd at a county fair. It could be a fine segment in its own right but it squeezes out any sense of momentum the track had, leaving it to build it back up. This happens twice during the song, and is accompanied by some of my least favorite vocals on the record, seemingly Rossiter’s attempt at a David Byrne impersonation. The second time is not nearly as egregious, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth that was thankfully washed down by the remaining seven minutes of the track. The instruments seem to fall apart and do their own thing, with the guitar and bass noodling together as the drums mess about in the background, all accompanied by a swooping synth holding it all together. This eventually evolves and combines into a repeated riff that I can’t help but compare to what might happen if American Football wrote Godspeed You! style Post-Rock, with massive swells and subdued use of volume throughout the closing minutes of the track, before fading into a close.
Magicians is the second 10+ minute song, and the final track on the record. It begins like a combination of a 90s alternative track and a Singer/Songwriter ballad, with closed-in vocals over a lone clean guitar, before breaking into another beautiful verse. By this point in the record the formula has definitely started to show itself but it doesn’t last long enough to grow stale, instead crumbling into a noisy experimental segment much like on the previous track, as the bass and guitar noodle over practically random drum hits. I prefer this segment to the one in Lark, mostly thanks to the incredibly lush reverberating production throughout the segment. At around the three-minute song the song essentially restarts, and while that may sound like a negative, it gives the group plenty more time to flesh out the ideas and riffs they built the first time around, before allowing the dissonant instrumental to build into the final section of the track. As the drums begin to increase in complexity and volume, a piano begins to pound and reversed guitar noises give a dizzying sensation and a massive sense of scale before releasing into the final “solo” on the record, with two guitars playing in perfect unison as more and more instruments pile on. Finally, it breaks and we’re left with a haunting vocal moment, as Rossiter barely whispers over a single guitar in an empty room. The intimacy is intense, and when it finally falls away there’s one final crashing finale to blow away everything around it, and then nothing. It’s a powerful ending made even more fantastic by the album preceding it.
Overall Young Jesus has blown me away with their latest effort, and while the pieces don’t always come together, resulting in some headscratch moments, the amount of ideas they string together effortlessly is truly impressive and the result is an album that shouldn’t be missed by anyone.
Favorite Tracks: Faith, Magicians, (un)knowing
Least Favorite Track: Lark
Rating: 8/10
Buy the album here: https://youngjesus.bandcamp.com/album/welcome-to-conceptual-beach
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