Send "Youth Lagoon " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 There are a few things we've come to expect from recent, home-recorded indie pop: thin production, lyrics that reference childhood and nostalgia, a vibe of hushed intimacy, lots of reverb. Youth Lagoon, the project of 22-year-old Boise, Idaho, musician Trevor Powers, ticks all of those boxes and sounds immediately familiar the first time you put it on. "Posters", the opening track on his debut LP, The Year of Hibernation, even starts with a warbly synth to evoke the fabled VHS glow that has become a touchstone for kids of his generation. When you hear so much of this stuff, it starts to bleed together-- almost as if by design-- and you start to wonder what it would take for an artist in this realm to stand out. Powers has a few ideas.Some of the album's appeal is straightforward. Powers writes melodies you remember and has an excellent ear for arrangement, even if the songs are rendered crudely. They generally start as whispered laments and then twist and turn until they become huge "oh oh oh" sing-alongs. The album sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom, which feels right given the small and personal details of the songs, but it strains to break free of its technical limitations. Rare is the record in this sphere that works much better loud, but The Year of Hibernation wants to be cranked. Room-filling volume allows a song like "Afternoon" to grow from its delicate, whistle-and-electric-keyboard opening into its grand, swelling conclusion, with a 4/4 marching drum and wordless vocal refrain that envelopes you like a hug. The title of the record describes its world. These are songs about alternately hunkering down and hiding, and heading out into the world to explore and report back on what you've found. Powers is very much an innocent here, a kid with an ear for poetry who mixes striking images with the occasional groaner. The music of the Pacific Northwest feels like a key touchstone, and in many ways Youth Lagoon seems like a shy, quiet, and more hermetic version of what Modest Mouse were doing before 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West. Small town claustrophobia bumps against the possibility of wide-open spaces. Two of the first three songs reference the late-night strobe of the television and beds and walls of posters, and these are mixed with campgrounds, woods, lakes, and watching fireworks from a roof. I don't want to strain the Modest Mouse comparison, since this record is performed by Powers alone (drum machines provide the pulse) and doesn't have a "band" feel, but his guitar breaks also show Isaac Brock's early flair for simple melodic embellishments that complement the songs perfectly....full text |
| Prettymuchamazing |
| Trevor Powers, the Boise-based multi-instrumentalist who dream pop-ifies his diary entries into songs as Youth Lagoon, is twenty-two years old. His age is only relevant because his grasp of melody is far beyond his years––he writes songs as timeless and effortless as though they had always existed––but his music simultaneously bears a refreshing, electrifying newness. Powers’ first record as Youth Lagoon is called The Year of Hibernation, which is on one hand rather erroneous a title for such a considered body of work and on the other a perfect match for his bright, nostalgic musical dreamscapes, somewhere at crossroads of lo-fi and chillwave, all fuzzy guitar riffs intertwined with electronic percussion and synth arpeggios. The product is a sound as intimate as it is expansive, transcendent of Powers’ bedroom studio but never quite forgetting its humble beginnings. Powers’ singing is heavily processed and buried in enough distorted haze that it sounds like he’s calling to you from the other end of the tunnel, but his voice is so tender and fragile (think the Antlers’ Peter Silberman’s heart wrenching delivery crossed with the eerie, raw sweetness of Deerhunter’s Lockett Pundt on “Agoraphobia”) that every word is loaded with a confessional quality, a soft secret, a disarming honesty. His instrumentals are complex and varied; soft piano notes seem to bloom into harsher, driving guitar chords you could easily cut out of Youth Lagoon and into the repertoire of punk-influenced lo-fi bands like Cloud Nothings. Vocals and music mélange to create a dreamy, sun-blinded nostalgia – these are songs with titles like “17,” “Afternoon,” “Daydream,” songs about times and places and memories, about things that are fleeting. Songs like “Cannons” and “Montana” have a kind of hallucinatory buildup into a huge, driving melody, like watching something explode in slow motion. They are songs that feel like Powers wrote them so he could remember those fleeting things, or maybe so that he wouldn’t have to remember them anymore. Everything has enough of a catchy toe-tapping earworm on liquid guitar or bright synth bells that you’ll have to remember it instead. We just wish there were more tracks to earworm their way into our heads – the record’s eight songs are hardly enough space for Powers to showcase his talent and versatility. It’s not that the tracks sound too similar – they’re part of a unified vision, but don’t seem like carbon copies – it’s that they’ll leave you wanting to hear what else Powers can do....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Trevor Powers, the 22-year-old guy behind Youth Lagoon, pulls off a pretty clever trick with The Year of Hibernation. It feels, at first, like a breezy record. The gauzy layers of keys and guitar, those spacious drum-machine beats, Powers’ keening vocals with their sense of wonder (something like a more tuneful Daniel Johnston), it all sounds sweet, downright wistful. Once you dig into the record, though, you get immersed in those hazy textures, and there’s some serious worry beneath them. The Year of Hibernation is about retreat from the world for a reason. It’s a deeply anxious record, one that channels into Powers’ fears, even as he crowds them with tones we generally find relaxing. Opener “Posters” shows this perfectly. The first half of the song features dreamy keys surging in the background while Powers bleats out his feelings. “I used to be outspoken,” he admits. “Do anything for anyone’s attention.” He sings this with a charge to his voice, but then he falters. Things have changed. “You make real friends quickly,” he then says, and with a wobbly whisper he adds, “But not me.” From there, a simple bass line comes in like a ticking clock, and when the beat kicks up it is jarring, even frightening. It’s not a surge of energy, it’s a spike of panic. It buries Powers’s singing further in the mix, and you can feel the anxiety flowing around him. There’s an almost childlike insistence of hope in these songs—“I have more dreams than you have posters of your favorite teams,” he assures us on “Cannons”—but it too often seems small in comparison to the mounting tension. The best moments of the record cut through that miasmic tension with a sharp guitar riff, as on “Posters” or “Afternoon”. In other places, Powers’s otherwise obscured vocals—they’re often rendered impossible to understand by a thick cloud of echo and hiss—clear and deliver a sweet sentiment or heartbreaking worry, or sometimes both. “When I was 17, my mother said to me ‘Don’t stop imagining’,” he sings on “17”. “The day that you do is the day that you die.” It’s a sweet ode to youthful, even naïve hope, and to the support of family, but it’s also troubling, since Powers sounds so often close to losing that imagination....full text |
Youth Lagoon lyrics Music videoclips
|
| ||||||||||
