Monday 07 February 2011
Blown minded
I don’t think Young Galaxy could have picked a more transparent title for their third record than Shapeshifting. Maybe calling it The Record Where We Change Everything About How We Sound and How We Record Music would have been more obvious, but I think that would be too much to fit on the vinyl and CD spine.
That being said, Shapeshifting is the Young Galaxy record that sounds perfectly comfortable in its own skin. Their self-titled debut, and the excellent Invisible Republic were both great albums in their own right, but Shapeshifting feels like the band have cultivated a sound that comes to them naturally, created organically. The reality is very much the opposite; Young Galaxy took the raw material that they’d been working on for their third LP and emailed it off to Dan Lissvik, one half of the Swedish duo Studio, who worked, reworked, and then worked some more on, er, shaping these 11 songs into the final product we hear on record. Young Galaxy had no input at all into what Lissvik was doing. They didn’t even get to hear any of the material until October last year, when Lissvik played Young Galaxy their new album over Skype.
Was the resulting icy cold, 80s-indebted synth-laden dance beats what they had envisioned when they gave Lissvik production control? Considering who they chose to helm the record, I’d say yes, very much so. Without hearing the raw material Lissvik was given, it’s all speculation as to whether the songs are radical reworkings or have just had spit and polish applied, but as I said earlier, this sound suits Young Galaxy like a glove. Catherine McCandless’s vocals are front and centre throughout Shapeshifting; that alone makes it a departure from their previous records. She shines on “We Have Everything” and the closing title track focuses all its attention on her incredible range and vocal dexterity by stripping away all but a spare instrumental arrangement.
If there’s one criticism I have (and really, it’s a small one), it’s that, if you get right into the record and start dissecting each track individually, not all the songs are of a consistent calibre. The standouts are just that: “Cover Your Tracks”, “Peripheral Visionaries”, “The Angles Are Surely Weeping” and the aforementioned “We Have Everything” will have you reaching for repeat over and over again. A few, though, come a bit too close to filler territory for my liking. Others teeter on the precipice of being great dance/pop tracks and just so-so ones. Case in point is the album’s penultimate song “B.S.E”, which starts as your standard fare dance pop before the tempo slows at the end and McCandless delivers and pulsating and intense closing mantra “Watch as energy/rolls out of us/on golden horns of light,” (I think it’s ‘horns’, I can’t tell–didn’t get a lyric sheet). Regardless, the album as a whole withstands this kind of close scrutiny and flows together magnificently.
You have to give Young Galaxy all due respect. They have never shied away from pushing the limits and boundaries that would cage lesser bands in. Young Galaxy have always played by their own rules; on Shapeshifting, they’ve not only written the rules, they have created a whole new game for themselves.
Shapeshifting is available on Paper Bag Records tomorrow, February 8.
MP3: Young Galaxy “We Have Everything”
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This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 8:35 am and is filed under MP3, QBiM SPiNS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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