#1106 Richard Youngs - Sapphie

The idea sounds so appealing: man goes to remote location with his guitar, records long (9, 9, 18 minutes. respectively) songs in a single-take and releases them without additional production. Pure music, man. The problem is each song is basically one guitar move, progressing through a couple of chords and circling back around, for its entire (long) length, with Youngs moaning over top. There's no particular progression, no moments that stand out, no moves or swerves at all, just pure, glacial minimalism. Which still might be appealing if not for 2 problems:

First, the guitar half of the songs is some pretty unexciting slow classical fingerpicking. It can be fun to tease apart how Youngs gets two independent-seeming lines to come out of one guitar, but again, its a trick per song, 3 for the whole album, and they're really all kind of variations on the same basic trick.

Secondly, and most damningly, this puts a lot of weight on the actual singing, and Youngs's yelp is charmingly untrained at best and a bleating paean to tunelessness at worst. The actual words are almost unintelligible, so you're left with this vague, unpleasant noise that is the only thing really going on on these songs. Heck, its so unpleasant it even wipes out the goodwill earned via the guitar's very occasional gestures towards evolution.

I admire its pure minimalism in the abstract, the bleak landscape it evokes, and I maybe even admire Youngs himself for making it, but this is music that should not be listened to by anyone with interest in enjoying themselves for the duration 2/5