Having been to some gigs at which people have performed songs (I swear I have, it isn’t all free jazz and drones round my way), I am aware that artists sometimes take requests for songs. This, however, is taking it to a whole new level. Here we have two new(ish) albums from Richard Youngs, both created at the behest of others, allowing them to (implicitly in one case, explicitly in the other) dictate the styles of the albums. Inceptor was recorded in late 2008 for the Volcanic Tongue label and shop run by David Keenan and Heather Leigh, who have been huge supporters of (and even collaborators with) Youngs; Youngs wanted to give them something in a style they would appreciate. Beyond The Valley Of Ultrahits was initially released on CD-R on Sonic Oyster Records after label boss Andrew Paine dared Youngs to make a pop album; it has now been (thankfully) reissued on vinyl by Youngs’s regular label Jagjaguwar.
If you were asked to make an album for David Keenan and Heather Leigh, you wouldn’t make a pop album, would you? You’d make a loud one-take album of freewheeling improvisation. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what Youngs has done here with Inceptor. Compared to previous releases, the abandonment of any semblance of conventional structure is striking. There are still lyrics, still even melodies, but these unpredictable paths arrive without warning from amongst intertwined knots of guitar and vocals, and are covered back over by undergrowth almost as quickly as they appeared in the first place. For example, the lyric of “Arise” is pretty much just that title, “Arise”, repeated like a mantra over jagged coils of guitar. Inceptor is an undeniably exciting experimental guitar record, however, with Youngs showing off the high-volume improvisatory chops of a man who has played with the likes of Makoto Kawabata, Neil Campbell and Matthew Bower over the years. By the closing track “Take Me Back To Believing” he is grasping at handfuls of broken glass and steel wool, scouring and scraping out a new musical route for himself.
Beyond The Valley Of Ultrahits‘s status as a limited CD-R was perplexing given that it is, by Youngs’s own admission, one of the best things in his catalogue; its re-release on LP has led me to concur with that assessment. It is a pop album, yes, but on Youngs’s terms: it marries genuine hooks and accessible structures to his own brand of folk minimalism. The musical influences are warmly nostalgic, late 80s/early 90s electronica (New Order, Pet Shop Boys, perhaps) , but tethered to that distinctive folk brogue, delivering some conceptually cohesive (and noticeably less cryptic) lyrics. Youngs traces epic spaces – valleys, vast seas, the cosmos – but the landscapes he lingers in most are mental ones. Memories. Dreams. The boundary between the real and the imagined. The “void”. Yikes. For despite the gently nostalgic air, there is a dark core to the album, as if perhaps these more tranquil moments are being hazily remembered from a more difficult vantage point some distance in the future. Unable to escape these ghosts, Youngs asks “Are we all mariners of an ocean past?” over the pulsing, skitterish waves of “Like A Sailor”, and a strangely moving, almost hauntological undercurrent. This is the unsettling feeling that has been getting under my skin as I’ve been listening to the vinyl repeatedly over the last month. I’d request that Youngs make more albums as good as this, but I’m not sure how feasible that would be.
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