Youth Lagoon, TIARAS, Roxanne from the Sandwitches
Harlow’s • Sacramento • Aug. 9, 2013
Recently turned on to Youth Lagoon, I’ve since been pairing their two albums, The Year of Hibernation and Wondrous Bughouse, with my daily morning coffee intake. Their dreamlike, underwater qualities make for an easy transition from half asleep to wide awake.
The brainchild of frontman Trevor Powers, Youth Lagoon hails from Boise, Idaho, and is signed to Fat Possum Records. Trevor describes his songwriting process as a mechanism to sort his thoughts and transfer his fears, and his music is accordingly not dissimilar to a roller coaster ride. Naturally, I was excited to hear about their appearance in Sacramento, booked by Abstract Entertainment, at Harlow’s.
Early into the first set, it was apparent that Youth Lagoon would be enjoying a decent turnout from Sacramento fans—the nightclub was already teeming with hipsters confusingly donning flannel shirts in spite of the warm summer night.
My mother always warned that if I couldn’t say something nice, then stay mum. So I’ll say little about the first act of the show, Roxanne from the Sandwitches. Her off-key soprano narrative atop her acoustic guitar made me feel uncomfortable, like an accidental voyeur peeping a broken-hearted amateur’s cathartic practice session.
After an inordinate amount of time following her exit, a quartet of scraggly musicians in tight jeans emerged nonchalantly from the green room and took the stage. This San Francisco-based, newly formed alliance called TIARAS was promoted as being partly comprised of ex-Ganglians and Fine Steps members. Three electric guitarists, a bassist and their menagerie of pedals created a beautiful, psychedelic soundscape, but TIARAS had an upbeat, danceable quality thanks to the drummer and cadence of the vocalist. The lead singer, Kyle Hoover, who resembled a hungry lion, brushed his long, side-swept blond hair out of his face, requested more reverb on his vocals and cuddled his guitar throughout their well-received set.
Then came the moment the now completely full house had been awaiting: Youth Lagoon assumed the position within an arc of giant canvas jaws lit up by a rainbow of colors, while exhalations of pink smoke seeped from between
the teeth.
Trevor Powers manned two stacked keyboards, adjacent to which was a tiny organ synthesizer. His touring band was made up of a guitarist, bassist and drummer, too, which sometimes rescinded into the background quietly to let the keys speak alone, to let Trevor sing softly.
Characterized as neo-psychedelia, Americana, indie rock and dream pop, Youth Lagoon’s genre-bending music dynamically transitions many times mid-song from calliope, to hymnal, to spacey, to driving, to noise—to pretty much anywhere on the spectrum of sound—seamlessly, skillfully and strategically, taking the listener on a journey through internal and external galaxies. Trevor beat his fists against his keyboards while playing restless arpeggios, and his band lifted the feet of the audience off the floor with climbing crescendos that culminated in eerie, cosmic plateaus. Then after carrying us across a starry expanse, Youth Lagoon cast us down cliffs, and we plummeted gladly in dramatic dirges before being hypnotically lifted up again.
Just as someone who’d nearly succumbed to submergence, Youth Lagoon left me feeling like I’d sunken into a deep, murky pool, struggled, panicked, gasped for breath—then, mercifully, a cloak of peace draped my consciousness and plunged me into a lucid euphoria. The bony fingers of death wrapped tighter and tighter around my throat until I was about to surrender…then let me go. It feels good to drown, and even better to live to tell about it.
It’s probably trite by now to remind you that fans just don’t consume music the way they used to. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. We still enjoy putting on an album and ingesting it en masse, but it’s also fun to put the iTunes on shuffle and let fate decide, troll YouTube for new music videos or share play lists via Spotify. So for this year’s Top 20, we decided to mix things up a bit. Instead of just albums, we included a music video, EPs, live shows (even a comedy album snuck in there). Here’s our favorite music moments of this past year, in tweet-friendly format.
20. Jason Webley (live show)
Beatnik Studios, Sacramento
Oct. 30, 2011
When the man on stage thrusts his torso into a giant red balloon and gets the entire audience drunk enough to link arms and sway, you know it’s a good show.
19. Thee Oh Sees Carrion Crawler/The Dreamer
In The Red
Each song rocks, and it’s short and catchy enough to listen back to back, and back. They have mastered a sound, exemplified here. Loud fun.
18. Keith Lowell Jensen Cats Made of Rabbits
Apprehensive Films
Possibly the local comic’s best work to date, if this album/DVD doesn’t have you rolling on the floor, check your pulse, you might be dead.
17. Mastodon The Hunter
Reprise
Mastodon ditches spacey prog metal for gnarly bruising metal/rock hybrid and makes us wonder why they haven’t tried it sooner.
16. Mike Colossal The Psychodelic Soundsations of Mike Colossal
Glory Hole Records
From dub to dusty breaks Mike earns the name Colossal.
15. Red Fang Murder the Mountains
Relapse Records
Metal heads dose heavy riffs w/ stoner-core harmonies, crushing drums, subtly brilliant solos & bring serious balls back to rock ‘n’ roll.
14. The Generationals (live show) Sophia’s Thai Kitchen, Davis
July 16, 2011
The small porch in Davis provided the perfect environment to fall in love with every up-beat strum from The Generationals.
13. Cousin Fik Hacksaw Ben Thuggin
Sick-Wid-It Records
Hacksaw Ben Thuggin. Period. Fik is a rapper for real. From Halloween concepts, to catchy anthems, his words are precise and full of vigor.
