#446 Youth Lagoon - The Year of Hibernation

Another piece of popular 2011 hotness, this one even recommended by some dude at an art party. I guess that's a thing; it was fun.

This album is really stunningly gorgeous. It has a preposterous mastery over sound, a Moby-at-his-peak level flawless insight into exactly what note needs to be played, fraught with perfect, inflected tones that move non-euclidean and dance in the light, shimmering like sunny winter lakes, glowing like ice. It's the stuff desperate similes are made of, weaving through the space cleared by New Slang, Ratatat's Cherry, and Here Come the Warm Jets, keening sounds that ring and vibrate, almost surely the best produced album of the year.

The other key is the approach to beats, which are absent for long stretches, but then kick in just perfect, simple, crisp, exactly what you heard in your head the beat before they arrived. Watch what happens the second time you listen to afternoon and the halfway point rolls around, those claps rise up out of your heart itself.

I'm not into the reverbey, wishy washy indie sound that is so big these days, and this falls into this category. I'm also not into the ragged, inflected approach to female vocals that seem so very popular (see also Wye Oak, coming up next). But this pulls its tricks so well I can't resist.

The album's last great strength is its brevity. There's something to be said for knowing when to quit, for providing an experience of the right length such that the listener is given a journey. Sure, with a long album you can always just not listen to the entire thing, but that's like justifying a long movie by saying that you could just leave in the middle. An album that overstays its welcome denies itself the chance to end gracefully. I might have liked this album even better as a 6 track EP, but I probably would have disliked it as a 12 track LP (see also various Pains of Being Pure at Heart that were great and then ran out of tricks). At 8 tracks, its close enough, dragging through July or so, falling into the 3 slow song trap that OK Computer practically invented (sorry stalwarts!).

As it is, its still a very pretty slice of indie, the only encouraging note to come out of this sleepy washed out movement in a long time. Music for laying around staring at the ceiling to 4.5/5

You might like this if: you love beauty and can tolerate indie excess