Young People
All At Once

A few months ago, their second album, "War Prayer," from 2003, ended up in my player.
Listening to it inevitably brought back memories of the Welsh trio that in the early eighties released an album and then vanished into the void from which they seemed to come.

The affinities between the Young Marble Giants and the Americans began with their name, in that call to a youth that was ironically gigantic and marble-like for one and drawn from the representation that American cinema of the '40s gave for the others.

Affinities were also found in the lineup (in both cases a trio) and in their inclination: extracting from the evident parsimony of means the elements that would constitute the sparse structure of their songs.

What differentiated the two works, not only temporally, was the greater versatility deployed by Young People: even if the tracks were often even shorter than the Welsh miniatures, this didn’t preclude sudden changes in sounds, glimpses of an almost folk relaxedness that didn't have time to unfold, attacked by sudden accelerations, concentrated bursts of off-kilter percussiveness. And the allusion to melody in the singer's voice coexisted with nervous distorted guitars, or softly narrated in almost spectral atmospheres. Then letting itself go, as in a play of quotations, to a stripped-down rock 'n' roll in the finale of the track that closed the album. 11 "songs" or rather 11 possible songs in less than 25 minutes. More condensed than the Y.M.G.!

Unlike the Welsh, however, Young People not only admirably overcame the hurdle of their second album, but they emerge for the third round in 2006 with a further reduced lineup: now they are a duo. And they maintain the Spartan "equipment," not only instrumental but also of intent, which characterizes them, along with a vaguely naive approach.

Accustomed to the mutations that survival in the market imposes, I imagined for them the arrival at a more canonical song form, an attempt to articulate in a less fragmented configuration the sprouts of their tracks.

But in "R&R," the first of the album, the phrase repeated by the piano and the dry metronomic beat in the background, outline the environment that welcomes us and in which Katie Eastburn's laid-back voice walks, bringing its simple melody to a terse close. Demonstrating from the outset what the rest of the album will confirm: it is a further exploration of the possible conjugations of their attitude. Nourished, in this case, by even more pronounced attention to the contrasts generated by brief suspensions, the appearance and disappearance of a sound, the small variations in the intonation of the voice, in its play with the atmospheres that the interweaving of few elements can generate.

For example, in the sudden explosion of a swirl of guitars punctuated by a whistle that begins "On The Farm," after the rarefaction with which the previous track, "Reapers," closed. A whirl that, however, abruptly stops to release remnants of sounds in distortion among which the apparent fragility of the voice assumes an almost theatrical physiognomy.

And right after, in "F," the liquid rebounds of a keyboard sound intertwine with a percussive base generated by the palms of two hands, in a muffled beat, offering the occasion for yet another vignette.

In "The Clock," again pale piano chords, and wide portions of silence, all around the suspended vocal melody, that hints at a "chorus" for the few seconds in which the keys move rhythmically.

Almost in every piece, glimpses of tension and bursts of void coexist, ghosts of melodies and angularities. Then, in the last one, "Ride On," the circle seems to close when the memory of the Welsh ancestors resurfaces in the sound of the bass and the extreme simplicity of the structure of the piece, which stops when it is taking shape and entering the circle.

In short, this concentrated set of possibilities in album form (this time 11 songs in 27' 35'') will return several times to your player, precisely for the sensation of "incompleteness" that runs through it and for its sprouts always on the verge of blooming. Or perhaps, for the same reason, it will be peremptorily expelled.

You can glean some clues from the sound extracts I've attached.

I continue to spin "All At Once," slightly regretting that I missed a recent date in my city, which would have allowed me to verify if the ghost of a song can "materialize" so well even live.