Review by Heather Phares
A striking first album, Young People introduces the group's unique blend of lilting, traditional-sounding melodies, experimental instrumentation, and Katie Eastburn's gorgeously flawed vocals. Shades of Palace, the Dirty Three, Cat Power, and the Velvet Underground haunt the band's music, but it still sounds remarkably fresh and timeless at once -- call it avant Americana. The spare, simple beauty of songs like "Ron Jeremy" (named for, but not about, the famed adult movie star) and "Repent" is both unusual and extremely affecting; Young People are among a few bands with experimental leanings that can also pack an emotional wallop. A large part of this impact comes from Eastburn, a singer whose limitations open up a realm of expressive possibilities. The way her voice cracks when she sings "We work so hard to survive" on "The Dishwashing Song" conjures up Dust Bowl-like images of strength and poignancy; she attains an ice-water purity on "Going" and a warm, aching sensuality on "Pier," a song whose spine-tingling beauty lies in the fact that it sounds so close to falling apart. This volatility reaches a peak on "Collection," where Eastburn laments "I wish my mind could be sharper/Instead of duller" before the song takes off at a gallop that the band can barely maintain. A soulful, spiritual feel infuses Young People, particularly on "Death Don't Have No Mercy," a traditional lament with a relentless, martial beat, and the hymnal "Stay Sweet," one of the album's gentler, more reassuring moments. With its sepia tones and wide-open, prairie earnestness, it's hard to believe this album was made in Los Angeles, but in a way that adds to its timeless feel. A beautiful but occasionally difficult debut, Young People isn't for everyone, but that just makes it a little more special if you do like it.
Young People
Young People
[5 Rue Christine/Kill Rock Stars; 2002]
Rating: 7.1
A few plucked notes, a warm drone and a cantankerous electric guitar introduce singer Katie Eastburn, whose flat tone sounds like a washerwoman laboring over the drawers of the man who done her wrong. Young People's debut album wallows in backwoods ambience, a fetishization of rural life with a kernel of the blues somewhere at its heart. But the music they cut from this atmosphere is intriguing, and inventively realized.
This Los Angeles trio makes music not unlike Nina Nastasia's recent The Blackened Air, but grayer and grainier, with more jagged edges. The band includes Eastburn on vocals and violin, and Jeff Rosenberg (Pink and Brown, Tarentel) and Jarrett Silberman (The Hansel & Gretel Disease Forest) switching between guitars, drums, organ, and other instruments, sometimes clanking and rattling like rough sex in a tool shed, and other times plodding along like a chain gang.
The mood is thick and dreary: it's absorbing, but dangerously close to becoming a caricature of misery. Of the twelve originals and one cover, almost every song is a ballad, dirge, work song, lament, or threnody-- including the one genuine blues song, their grave-diggingly somber cover of Rev. Gary Davis' "Death Don't Have No Mercy". And there's an edge of hipsterism that undercuts the starkness-- for example, they name the first track "Ron Jeremy", after the fun-to-namecheck porn star. At least Leadbelly would have written "The Ballad of Ron Jeremy".
But one reason the album works is that these slow tunes and sturdy melodies are a framework for their spatterings of noise, which turn this into engrossing art-folk. The guitars are raw and unsteady, playing bashing distortion on "The Dishwasher" or short creaks of feedback over "The Pier". The drums often play not so much a beat or a pulse, but lumbering repetitions-- just as Eastburn's violin at the start of "Repent" is the weariest sawing I've ever heard. Likewise, Eastburn's voice has a matter-of-fact plaintiveness that defines, but can also box in, her performance.
In contrast, the few times Young People do break the mood are revelatory, especially on the last three tracks. "Collection", and my personal favorite, "Elizabeth Taylor", break free with the horsepower of a brand-new pick-up truck, the lead guitar searing over Eastburn's reinvigorated voice. And on "Fly Seagull Fly", when engineer Rod Cervera steps in to provide more conventionally rhythmic drums, Eastburn is pushed to a fine point of yearning.
Still, as much as this album can suck you in, it rarely connects. It draws on styles that encourage empathy as much as sympathy, where you listen to singers spill their sob stories because they remind you of your own, and they pull you into a two-way exchange. But Young People are more like a spectacle: you're detached from the sharp pain they describe, much as it seems like their music is detached from the folk and blues that it cribs from. Maybe to get them in character for their next record, 5RC should sentence them to a couple years of hard labor.
-Chris Dahlen, December 02, 2002
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