Album Debate: Youth Lagoon – Wondrous Bughouse

The new album from Youth Lagoon has been so keenly anticipated that we’ve had to widen our review to feature not one, but two writers! Intriguingly, both have differing opinions of the soundscapes within, with Christopher Sharpe praising its grandeur and Sophie Monk reproaching its levels of sonic clutter. Be sure to get your own opinions heard in the comments below, but for now, it’s over to Mr Sharpe to open the debate…

Wondrous Bughouse finds Trevor Powers emerging out of hibernation, armed with an album dedicated to the uptake of the formative advice extended to him at the centrepiece of his debut: “Don’t stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die.”

Where that imagination (both musically and production-wise) seemed to be previously kept within the confines of his childhood home, here it explodes outwards, reaching into space. Like all fantasias however, the expression of it comes packed with both the gorgeously fanciful and the darkly surreal.

The anthemic qualities and grandiosity on display here – not just through a production upgrade but within the songwriting itself (the majority of the tracks exceed the five-minute mark and contain multifarious leaps and lurches in sound and mood) – expounds a new self-confidence in Powers’ explorative compositional capabilities. The melody of ‘Raspberry Cane’ has this anxious, psychedelic Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-at-the-wrong-RPM quality; the wooziness that infuses ‘Dropla’ gives way to the urgently emotive, eyes-screwed-shut refrain “You’ll never die, you’ll never die”; while ‘Mute’ is humongous, propelled by crashing drums and celestial synths. It all builds through a guitar solo that would have seemed near-inconceivable two years ago, and it continues all the way up-until the final, triumphantly teetering piano-line: undoubtedly the album’s highlight.

Throughout these moments of grandeur though, the pervading abstractive edge of the album always breaks through. The endearing bedroom-pop melodies and personal lyrics that characterised The Year Of Hibernation give way here to the overarching sonic vision of a disintegrating cosmic circus, characterised by a lyrical fixation on death and grotesque imagery, while songs are punctuated by dissonant pulsating loops, which reach their most queasy and discomforting on ‘Attic Doctor’ and ‘Sleep Paralysis’.

When you buy into the aesthetic, these aspects prove to be immensely successful, but, particularly when combined with the occasionally grating pitch of the vocals, songs sometimes have the effect of being pushed too far, of being taken out of the song and eventually overwhelmed by a frictional experience akin to witnessing a shrill four-year old singing / squawking “adorably” on an ancient home-video.

Like all coming-of-age stories, Youth Lagoon’s music has its flaws, errors of judgement and mishaps, but in truth, having broken free of the small-town boundaries he was looking to escape, Powers has returned with a clutch of truly memorable songs and an album of impressive and exciting scope. It’s a 2K13 recasting of the Summer of Love, from the perspective of a boy who gets anxiety attacks and has spent too long indoors with an iPod full of Elephant 6. And that’s wonderful.

Christopher Sharpe

There’s no denying Wondrous Bughouse is a smart and intact record, but perhaps Youth Lagoon’s second instalment is too clever for its own good.

Trevor Powers, the man behind Youth Lagoon, pits his nasal, MGMT-like vocals against a backdrop of reverb-laden guitars and synths, although more often than not, a rampant overcrowding of noise reduces Powers’ brittle voice to a thrumming undertone in a dystopian carnival of sound.

Sonic congestion is just one of the many features of this album that makes it impenetrable and occasionally alienating. The tight lyrical congruity and instrumental motifs create a mishmash of indistinguishable songs so that the more engaging tracks on the album – such as ‘Mute’ and ‘Dropla’ – get swamped in a blurry haze of psychedelia. I suppose that, as a concept album, it is hardly Powers’ intention with Wondrous Bughouse to create an anthology of hits, but when the concept itself seems to be something vague and opaque about the transience of mortality, some profundity is unfortunately lost in the fray.

Production-wise, Wondrous Bughouse marks a definitive step away from the humble beginnings of debut release The Year Of Hibernation. Literally a home-made production (recorded in Powers’ bedroom studio), Youth Lagoon’s first offering had none of the sheeny rendering that Powers’ collaboration with producer Ben H. Allen has afforded him this time round, but maybe the cruder finish is what made The Year Of Hibernation an all-round more convincing effort. If Powers’ debut tapped into a dream-like aesthetic, Wondrous Bughouse is more of a nightmare, not only for its uncanny fairground evocations and weird, déjà vu moments, but for a kaleidoscopic overabundance of effects that begins to grate only three songs in.

Unfortunately, Wondrous Bughouse perpetuates an ever-unattractive tendency of second albums: it tries far too hard to demonstrate maturity; a similar fate that befell MGMT with the release of sophomore record Congratulations, after the ingenuity of Oracular Spectacular. While this certainly befits the album’s themes of anxiety and desperation, the comparative effortlessness of The Year Of Hibernation still holds infinitely more appeal.

Precocious, but ultimately immature, Wondrous Bughouse compulsively fills every empty space with distorted instrumentation, resulting in a tough chunk of sound to chew your way through. Ironically, in expanding the production space from bedroom to full studio, the result is more claustrophobic and cluttered: an unsatisfying follow-up to Youth Lagoon’s vastly superior first album.

Sophie Monk

Similar To: The Flaming Lips, Craft Spells, Beach Fossils

MP3: ‘Mute’, ‘Dropla’