Chimpomatic | Youthmovies Review - Good Nature - 2008

Youthmovies are an Oxford based quintet put together by Al English and Foals founding member Andrew Mears. After a series of well received EPs comes their debut album Good Nature, a distillation of the band’s various incarnations and the long graft of touring and festival playing.

The band cites King Crimson, Steve Reich and Sonic Youth as their official influences but there’s a lot going on in here and straightening out some kind of musical heritage is pretty pointless. In today’s musical landscape of retro-mania it’s refreshing to find myself perplexed and this is both the band’s strength and stumbling block.

There’s innovation aplenty here, songs that build and fragment, tease and frustrate; shifting from squalls of guitar, brass and heavy drumbeat to sudden, becalmed stillness. 8 minutes is a long time though and Youthmovies don’t shy away from extending their template of alternating (often conflicting) musical movements over such lengths. The effect is idiosyncratic and unpredictable but can be tedious in the same measure.

At it's most successful, on tracks like If You’d Seen A Battlefield, the band concede that melody is not a bad thing. The music slips between cascading guitars and rhythm driven brass, then erupts into a baroque guitar crescendo. It’s exciting. But the band’s habit of reducing lyrics to short phrases, repeated like mantras, expose a problem and in this particular song - a dangerous truth. ‘It’s not going well and it’s not going badly, it’s just going’, repeats Andrew Mears and he’s got a point.

Something for the Ghosts begins a 9-minute run by mesmerising you; shifting from wistfully repeated lyrics to tumbling guitar chords and building drumbeats. In many of these tracks, the changes of tempo and pace can become exhausting and ultimately a bit aimless. Here the song avoids becoming fractured and drives on, building ominously and with a kind of savage determination. It’s a shame then, when it hits the closing lines; ‘Motorway crash-barriers make me feel like we’re going to crash’. It’s not just that the words claim a kind of minimalist, poetic potency which is clearly beyond them but that in their delivery, Mears once again veers the sound dangerously close to Bloc Party territory.

Youthmovies tackle the label of prog-rock head on in their promotional material, then kind of do a little shimmy to avoid it sticking. They declare that it’s only ‘prog-rock’ to the ‘initiated’ but then spend the album trying to convince you that ‘progressive’ isn’t ‘a dirty word’. They’re right it isn’t and Good Nature does manage to get you onside. But equally they’re wrong to suggest there’s nothing pretentious about the swelling bombast and lyrical misjudgement which occasionally undermines the album. 6 tracks in, Good Nature hits it's stride and the journey’s well worth going on. There’s plenty more to come from Youthmovies I’m sure.

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"The band cites King Crimson, Steve Reich and Sonic Youth as their official influences"

I wouldn't take those too literally, they're from their myspace, which they most likely just use as a sort of 'music I grew up listening to' rather than a 'music I aspire to re-create' list.

Great review! The album really grows on you :D

14th Feb 2009 12:13pm

L'Immortel

Clunky French revenge actioner, with Jean Reno hunting down les mobsters that put 22 bullets in him.

Good Nature

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