Youthmovies: Good Nature
Impressive musicianship and lofty ambitions from Youthmovies.
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Thursday, 13, Mar 2008 04:26
Drowned in Sound Recordings, out now.
In a nutshell...
Mediocre prog pop/indie/rock surprise
What's it all about?
The first album from Oxford five-piece Youthmovies, Good Nature sees the band attempt to launch itself into uncharted mainstream territory. Revered as an adventurous blend of intense time signatures and backed with epic orchestrations, Good Nature aims to flip the pop/rock music genre in the same way as Radiohead and Battles.
Who's it by?
Though this is their first full album, Youthmovies have built up a solid reputation as artists pushing musical boundaries with their previously released EPs. With many band member changes, Youthmovies have finally (for the moment) settled on Al English, Graeme Murray, Stephen Hammond, Sam Scott and Andrew Mears, who was also a founding member of current indie favourite Foals.
As an example...
"Teenage landscapes make paragons of animal behaviours/And these teenage landscapes make heroines with the salt of foolishness." – The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys?
Good Nature sadly contains little that is imaginative enough to stand out for such prestigious awards. Most likely to improve perhaps, but nothing close to album of the year.
What the others say
"Ostensibly progressive rock to the uninitiated onlooker, Oxford-based quintet Youthmovies can be a difficult band for the inexperienced to digest in a single sitting." – Remotegoat.co.uk
"Here we have another band who fully embody the phrase drowned in sound." – Adie Nunn, Drowned in Sound
So is it any good?
Good Nature is an album that borderlines atmospheric and dense in all the right places whilst simultaneously sounding confused in all the wrong places. What does it add up to? An album that may not to appeal to a mainstream audience.
On Good Nature, what you have are essentially two sides of the prog coin: adventurous, surprising and genre-flipping on the one side, messy, jumbled and confusing on the other, and though Youthmovies stay on the former side most of the album, they do slip in a few songs.
The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor sounds like it is in dire need of a remix or at the least a reworking of the lyrics and Shh! You;ll Wake It never reaches the musical heights of some of their other tunes. Most tracks are good yet unfortunately they don't get better that the first track, Magdalen Bridge. The pro-longed intro here is fantastic and effective in building not just the mood of the song, but the whole album. It's just a shame there isn't more like this to sustain what is essentially a mediocre debut.
4/10
Louise Cadell