Review by Heather Phares
An album full of tension and beauty, War Prayers expands on the prairie ruminations of Young People's stunning debut album in fascinating, and often contradictory, ways. "El Paso" begins the album on a warmer, brighter note than anything they achieved on their somber first album, but then songs such as "Dutch Oven" present Young People at their most abstractly brooding, with angry guitars swarming over Katie Eastburn's keening voice. Eastburn remains one of indie rock's most expressive vocalists: when she sings about the "flappin' of the feathers" on "Lord," she sounds like she's in a bird costume; on "Early Poetry" she's rapt, with little flaws and gasps giving the clarity of her voice more dimension and humanity. While War Prayers lacks the single-minded, god-fearing purpose of Young People, the album does provide more moods for Eastburn and the rest of the band to explore, from the sweetly anarchic "Ne'er Do Well" to the dark sensuality of "Stagecoach." Several songs do indeed sound like rituals in preparation for some kind of battle: on "Tammy Faye" the band chants "We are all going" backed by ominous drums; on "Rhumba," these drums sound like a cross between a reveille and a showy big-band rhythm as Eastburn sings, "If I should die/Box me up/Ship me home." The band also finds new ways to express its fluid, stream-of-consciousness approach on "Ask About the Dust," which moves from hushed vocals and brushed drums to an ecstatic burst of noise to a galloping finish so seamlessly that it's hard to believe that the song only lasts a little over two minutes. "Night of the Hunter," meanwhile, is a radical version of the spooky song from the classic film about the fly whose children flew into the moon. Beginning with a folky, almost childlike simplicity before turning punkabilly, it's one of the more unusual and ambitious songs from a band that is by its nature unusual and ambitious. Throughout the album, Young People display the fierce naivete that makes their music bracing, and occasionally, inaccessible. However, their songs have a momentum that's thrilling, if you're willing to go along with it. Young People's singularity might make it a slightly better album, but War Prayers' adventurous spirit makes it an exciting, and often rewarding, follow-up.
Young People
War Prayers
[Dim Mak; 2003]
Rating: 8.3
Drippy, rhapsodic and flaky, the second outing from former 5 Rue Christine art-rockers Young People sways seismically through spacious art-pop, patiently allowing bursts of pine-tar noise to emerge unannounced. Perhaps as the cookie-cutter hodgepodge of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs rightfully falls off the radar, more weary travelers will start tripping and shouting to the beautiful post-folk urban sprawl of War Prayers. Potentially excellent tour buddies for the equally ramshackle Baptist Generals, this coed trio (including ex-Pink & Brown skins-crasher Jeff Rosenberg) has an admirable unwillingness to tidy their songscapes. The ad hoc pace allows their chilled, alt-country Bow Wow Wow to time-lapse bloom into a John Cale in-house experiment redirected by anonymous cowboy junkies obsessing over The Raincoats. Loose-hewn fragments like pitted stars, "Rhumba" and "The Valley" masticate into homegrown improvisations during doped-up power outages; the stuttering movement between the roundtable Susanne Vega folkie singalong "Tammy Faye" and the reverb in spring of "Ne're Do Well" are a cloudburst of black-magic pick scratching, Sabbath guitar accents, and vocalist Katie Eastburn's powerful lullaby of a sing/shout, shout/sing.
Stylistically, Eastburn acts-out as a less-fancy Bj?rk on the wonderful "Stagecoach" where she manages to tread the line between on and off key while the factory-worker sounds her bandmates concoct rumble and hiss along the production line. She's also Chan Marshall's Wiccan sister moping through a slipshod buzz on "El Paso". Elsewhere, imagine an anonymous small-town jazz favorite awkwardly humming a meandering spiritual in a dive bar with ex-members of Pere Ubu and a drunken, bemused Richard Hell providing a strategic, sick-kid choir of burnouts and ill-sent bastards.
"The Lord" is a military/religious benchmark, exactly 60 seconds of bombastic celebratory pop riddled within horns, humming bees, and enough joyous cymbal splashes to loosen up even the most jaded of hipsters. It's one of many parade stoppers, a climactic grand finale in Cat Power: The Musical-- performed by nascent SpinArt stars Suddenly Tammy!-- when the young Amish woman playing a Dickensionian Chan Marshall unearths ultimate happiness in the self-mythologizing of her sadness during a crazed rollercoaster ride at nearby Hershey Park. She decides, in sotto vocco, at that very moment, to first buy some cotton candy and then take part in a vaguely understood, largely abstract music project she saw mentioned twenty years ago in a romantic pamphlet written by David Wojnarowicz.
As a whole, the eleven sprawling ragas on the War Prayers evoke high-school poetry, cool-ass soothsaying, dirty squats, Velvet Underground shadow puppets, and the hunger of John Fante. What's more important is that these really are prayers. The band's grubby tribal spirit may or may not supplant the sparkly succubus eyeliner dross regurgitated as porn-star-pabulum by the menagerie of Luxx regulars spoiling my local nightlife, but regardless the final results, Young People's contagious slow-core vibrancy and unwillingness to settle for an obvious post-punk narrative explodes their humble DIY into a wonderfully zealous act.
-Brandon Stosuy, October 03, 2003
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