#486 Young Galaxy - Shapeshifting

Sorry Young Galaxy, you’re about to get underappreciated by this amateur mini-reviewer for things that have nothing to do with you. It’s all Brit’s fault. She's gotten me into tons of this kind of stuff: synthy, sleepy indie, carefully produced and full of airbrushed neon details. Think Twin Shadow’s spare post-R&B. And I’ve just heard plenty of it.

Maybe it’s not so simple. Maybe this is a trap Young Galazy laid for themselves by trying so hard to be what the indie kids what they want to hear. Bear with me.

Some of it works perfectly well: Blown-Minded’s endless pulse and Eno-honed skyward surges, We Have Everything’s irresistible young folks anthem churn*. And there are surely clever moments and details throughout.

But there’s also something uncannily wrong with Shapeshiting. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it probably has something to do with the cringeworthy idea of legions of privileged indie fans swooning to lines like “in poverty, my love, we have everything”. That’s possibly the most what’s-wrong-with-indie-rock line of the year, to the point of seeming parody. And then there’s that vaguely world-musical steel drum and beat and ooh and ah stuff that creeps into Cover Your Tracks and BSE on the backside, which rubbed me wrong when Eno and Gabriel were going it in the 80’s. And the cloying obviousness of the lyrical imagery, not to mention the band’s name itself, evoking the now and the eternal in the least subtle terms imaginable. Plus the actual aforementioned sameyness of the overall sound.

It feels engineered for those chasing the high they got from Cut Copy and M83 at their respective peaks, and it all leaves you feeling a little used. Context context. Might have been amazing if it hadn’t felt like a point on a carefully-plotted trajectory 2.5/5

You might like this if: you like synthy, emotionally eternal indie rock, and either a) haven’t heard enough to have burned out, or b) are so voracious for it that you don’t mind when it sticks to the formula.