YOUNG PEOPLE

Young People's short, minimal, brutally beautiful songs draw their inspiration from ancient hymnals and confessionals and blues numbers, taken with a strong dose of Broadway. The Brooklyn via L.A. trio play stark and aloof and downright frightening music: by equal measure inspiring, comforting, chilling.

Young People was born in Los Angeles in the winter of 2001. Katie (4 Hard Gulps Theater Co; Janet Pants Dans Theeatre) and Jeff (Pink & Brown, Lumen) had been writing drinking songs together in Berlin, collaborating on dance scores in San Francisco, and dreaming of a new band. Migrating south, they met Jarrett (Uphill Gardeners, co-founder of LA club The Smell), who brought his affection for noise and sense of space to the group, initially formed as a "country band", but that notion was dropped at the first rehearsal.

The trio switch instruments a lot both live and in the studio. Katie writes short traditional tunes, mining early American literature, hymnals, musical theater and films for lyrics. She sings timeless melodies while trading places with Jarrett and Jeff on drums, bass, guitars, violin, and various percussive elements. It is a spare palette that can deliver swampy, jarring waves of noise and unaccompanied voice in the same set.

Young People's music is very much shaped by the landscape and lifestyle in Los Angeles. The band are proud to be part of a musical lineage that includes the Doors, X, the Gun Club, Neil Young, and the Germs. "LA is where Young People was born, and LA is an indelible part of our sound," says Rosenberg. So why move to New York? "Katie didn't want to live in the desert anymore. Jarrett had never lived anywhere but LA, and I missed the East Coast. We were all game to see what would happen to our aesthetic in totally different surroundings."

The band take their name from a later-era Shirley Temple film Jarrett read about and suggested to friends for their band. They refused, but the name stuck when he later brought it to Katie and Jeff.

Young People released their first, self-titled CD on 5rc (Kill Rock Stars) in June 2002. Rod Cervera recorded it in Katie and Jeff's basement and the cafeteria of a now-demolished nunnery in L.A. Young People moved to Brooklyn in February 2003, and their second LP/CD, "War Prayers", was released by Dim Mak in October 2003. This release was recorded in a farmhouse outside of Olympia, WA, again by Cervera (for session photos, see www.ilikeyoungpeople.com. Hand Held Heart released a 12" EP, "The Single", in May 2003.

Dim Mak Releases:
DM056: Young People "War Prayers" LP/CD

Press

Updated 07/27/04

Blow Up
"Borderline Noise"


Updated 02/13/04
City Lights
by Matthew Borlik
When two-thirds of its founding members are experimental noise-rockers, an alt-country band is probably safe from ever sounding like Ryan Adams. Which is why Brooklyn's Young People have earned such high praise for their not-so-subtle tinkering with a musical genre more watered-down than Mr. Love Is Hell's last cocktail. War Prayers, Young People's second country-tinged full-length, finds the trio abandoning almost all sense of conventional songwriting in favor of the stripped-down stylings more commonly associated with avant-rock deconstructionism-often consisting of little more than Katie Eastburn's soulful (if endearingly off-key) vocals and Jarrett Silberman's downright tribal drumming. Ex-Pink and Brown drummer Jeff Rosenberg fills in the gaps with a little reverb-drenched chord here and scratchy blast of noise there, finishing touches to a surprisingly accessible record. Young People play with the Gossip and Dame Fate at 8:30 p.m. at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. $10. (202) 667-7960.


Updated 01/21/04
JUNKMEDIA
by Ben Sterling

A California (and now Brooklyn) based trio called Young People quietly released one of the most intriguing albums of the year this past fall. War Prayers, the groups second album, is an unusual amalgamation of country-church hymnal, Broadway musical, and a lean, "less is more" indie rock aesthetic. It's a creaky delight, suffused in a folksy grace that also bears hints of punk's ascetic lilt. Needless to say, Junkmedia was on the case, and we recently caught up with lead singer Katie Eastburn.

How did Young People come together?

I first met Jeff [Rosenberg] in San Francisco back in 2000. I was dancing and started writing music as a soundtrack to a dance I was doing and I met Jeff and he sort of validated that for me. You know, I'd have a tune in my head but didn't know how to put it down and we collaborated on a dance score together. Then I went to Berlin later that year and he happened to come out to Europe with another band and he stayed with me for a while and we started writing... basically drinking songs together because there wasn't much else to do there. I was studying dance and was broke and whatever and we'd just drink and write songs.

So when we came back to California we relocated down to L.A. and were tired of the Bay Area and met Jarrett [Silberman] immediately. He and Jeff actually met on the internet (laughs), seriously on Spock Morgue or something horrible like that.

What's that?

Spock Morgue, it's a really geeky music listserv, and it was really popular in San Francisco and Jeff was on it when a friend of Jarrett's had signed him up for it and he was only on it for a little while but they met in that stretch of time so that when we got to L.A. we immediately started hanging out and started playing together right away. And in L.A. practice space was very cheap and plentiful so we played all the time. This was? the winter of 2001.

And you had just then started to play and write music.

Yeah, I mean I'd always sang in church choir and I was always a theater and dance person, so I was very used to performance, and a little bit of singing but it just sort of happened all at once.

It sounds like you write the songs together.

It happens differently. Most often I come up with a melody just by myself, singing somewhere, then I'll sing it to the boys and we will all collaborate on the instrumentation, that's the most frequent way. For War Prayers we switched around instruments a whole lot. That wasn't the case on the first record, but this time Jarrett and I share the drums and we all switch a lot.

Is the concise nature of the songs part of the concept or just how it works out?

I guess it's a little bit of both. Personally, I tend to write short melodies that aren't necessarily repetitive and for us I think we just write as much as we think is necessary so that it's not boring to any of us. But I really think that each song is exactly how much needs to be there.

I read a quote from one of you saying that Los Angeles had a big impact on your sound, and I?m curious what you meant by that.

You know, it's a shame that Jarrett and Jeff aren't here because I think that it's really different for each of us. For me, I drove a lot and that's where I wrote all of the songs, just driving and singing in the car. So to me it's that sound, of all the personal space in Los Angeles, the chance to be so isolated there, in a luxurious way.

For Jarrett, he's never lived anywhere else until now. And I think we consider ourselves coming out of the tradition of the Doors and X and the Germs and all of these bands that were based there and were influential to us individually, so I think there was something kind of magical about being in the landscape where all of that happened.

But you moved.

But we moved! For a lot of reasons... I didn't want to live in the desert anymore... and Jeff and I had both lived on the east coast before and missed it and were ready for a change, and Jarrett had never lived anywhere else. I moved to L.A. after a long period of training and gestation in San Francisco band immediately became uber-productive in LA. I met all kinds of collaborators right away, both dance and music. And it was just so fertile and productive. But for me after the startup energy was burned off after two years I sort of looked around the environment felt kind of poisonous, the desert and stuff. I kind of wanted to breath something else, literally.

So how's New York going?

It's good. I work in the theater here and it's one of the reasons I wanted to come here. There have been some challenges, like practice space. We were totally used to being able to go in and play whenever we felt like it in L.A. It's made us focus a whole lot more in terms of being able to play not be a given. We think a lot harder, creating a lot more all the time so that when we do have studio time it's very focused and productive.

I notice a big difference among audiences in New York as well, and people in general in New York and what they need from music as opposed to L.A.

What is that difference?

Well, my experience is so limited because I'm not the kind of person to go to shows generally, so my sampling is smaller. I go see a band if I really, really want to see that band. I think that in L.A. it tends to be more in the background, music was just part of a night of hanging out, people would just get together and hang out and maybe not even be in the same room as band.

In New York it seems like people really need something from the band. I think people's time is much more precious here and it seems in contrast to way out west. There's more a sense of urgency and it makes me feel like stepping up to the plate, which is a good feeling.

Do you think you're starting to "sound like New York"? Not like you're starting to sound like The Strokes or whoever, but do you think your new material may be drawn explicitly from that experience?

Yeah, in some ways. Like really literally, "oh this drumbeat is the sound of that train that we were practicing under for two months". I don't really know yet otherwise, but I'm sure it is. That's another reason we wanted to move, to see the impact of a different environment on the sound.

Is a community of musicians important? Do you have that in New York?

Well, for me it's always important to be around people that inspire you. And that can mean other musicians but also the teenage girls that I make theater with in Manhattan and the geeky theater people I wrote musicals with, so it?s pretty broad. That's something I really like about New York. And there's a wonderful group of musicians here who have been really welcoming to us in technical and artistic ways.

So, last question: what's up with those kids on the last song of War Prayers?

Oh, those are two girls, Marisella and Evilyn who were my students in LA. at the Echo Park Community Center. They were my two most die hard students and we started having a club together where we'd hang out and make dances and have fun. So when we wrote that song, which is based on this film "The Night of the Hunter" we?

It was based on what?

It's a movie starring Robert Michum and actually two children are the stars, and the dialogue is a composite of various scenes that happen with the kids roaming about the countryside running away form evil Robert Michum. That's who those kids are.




Updated 12/3/03

STYLUS MAGAZINE
by Eric Seguy

Once relegated to middle school textbooks and the minds and hearts of slovenly, middle-aged recreationists, the Civil War is making a comeback in a big way. Rather predictably, there aren?t many seen wearing the ole? Blue and Gray yet, but a strain of Lincoln-era alt-country has gradually seeped into my singular consciousness. Musically, the most direct line back to this thesis would be Matmos? The Civil War (Featuring antiquated instruments like the hurdy-gurdy, and, uh, rabbit pelt, processed through a filter of glitchtronica), though one could also make pressing arguments for Crooked Fingers? Red Devil Dawn and Nina Nastasia's The Blackened Air espousing the sort of dusty, distinctly American sound one characterizes with muskets and the railroad cars.

It makes sense then, in an ass-backwards sort of way, that having more or less depleted the uniqueness of nearly all boutique genres (Anti-Folk, Goth-Rock, Riot-Grrl, Blah, Blah, Blah), one would seek musical inspiration in the yellowing, square pages of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. While I?m not quite at the point at which I?m willing to pack lumps of hardtack in my buck-skin satchel, the Young People's War Prayers provides a compelling argument to synchronize my cultural watch back one hundred fifty years or so.

The young people in question vocalist/percussionist Katie Eastburn, guitarist Jeff Rosenberg, and percussionist Jarrett Silberman seek to restore a lifeblood of primitivism to an otherwise anemic alt-country scene. They jettison conventional notions of authenticity for example, there is no cliche bluegrass twang, no smokey drawl in favor of an impressionistic aural representation of embattled political sectors, Coal Miners? Daughters, and soldiers sent home in coffins. Every instrument here chops like an axe, boils like a cauldron, hits like a hammer. The percussion is always sparse as a gunshot, and Rosenberg's guitar always a dark thundercloud of feedback, striking impertinently at the woods below. And then there?s Eastburn, who howls her words with the depressed urgency of someone trapped too long down in a mine in which every canary has died.

Forgive the mellifluous analogies, but there?s simply no band I?ve heard in recent years that warrants the plausibility of these comparisons. Take, for instance, the aptly-named "Dutch Oven," in which Rosenberg?s guitar positively thrums with white-heat, Eastburn?s cowbell pounds the melody into the place as a blacksmith might fell a piece of metal into shape, and Silberman?s cymbals sizzle like popping fat. It?s a simple folk melody, irrevocably art-damaged by the unique playing of all involved, and perfectly about itself; the song, you see, sounds exactly how you would imagine a Dutch Oven to sound like (as opposed to what one actually does; I don?t believe they make any particular sound).

"The Lord" fares similarly well, a perfect minute of Electr-o-Pura Ragtime blues and crashing cymbal hits. One eventually realizes that these songs are the sounds of America?s beginnings?all bent steel and smoke and gunshot wounds. "Tammy Faye" best summarizes this concept of restless empire: it ends with a steady drum march and Eastburn chanting, "We are all going...We are all going..." restlessly until it stops with the finality of a fatal blow.

By merit of their vaguely patriotic/religious hymns, the Young People have found an entire unmined history on which to graft their abrasive instrumentation, and Eastburn?s rusted-metal vocals. "Ne?er Do Well," a song about "ne?er doing well," features an impossibly simple vocal line, guitar, gently weeping, and thin percussive hits, and eventually bursts into a screeching guitar that sounds like a thousand bagpipes.

That the song moves from idea to idea so effortlessly can be traced back to the Young People?s secret, or at least my suspicion of it: every melody (and melodic idea) here is cribbed from the detritus of trashed Americana. You?ve heard these melodies in church, or perhaps on the transitional montage of someone "Origins of America" PBS special. They?re bleak, triumphant, and above all, transcendent, much like Souza's "Stars and Stripes Forever," or our National Anthem. They're at once the basis and inspiration for songs that plumb our national identity and fires our urge to cure beef on the back porch of a cabin in the woods.

I saw Young People last April on a bill with Spoon?the bands? aesthetics could not be more different, and, as a result, it was the type of stultifying performance that had me praying the audience wouldn?t be too hard on them. Perhaps it was through this psychic bonding (In which I which I was so fiercely vigilant for the band?s honor that I sort of fell in love them), that the seeds of my enjoyment were sewn. Indeed, I've found that not everyone loves the Young People as much as I do.

They are very abrasive (comparisons could be made to Xiu Xiu or Deerhoof, former 5rc label-mates to Young People), a fact a might have left by the wayside in my description of the unadulterated nourishment their songs provide. But I can?t think of a recent album that taps into historical American music, scuffs it up, and lays it all on the table so convincingly. War Prayers is a minor masterpiece, 24 minutes worth of songs as ragged, tried and true, and down-in-the-woods honest as a piece of leather toughening up in the sun.

ROCKPILE
WAR PRAYERS by Reed Jackson

Despite the politically appropriate title of this record, the Crooklyn-via-LA. Trio Young Poeple don?t sing about recent international affairs. Instead, singer Kate Eastburn takes a broader view of history, ransacking old drinking songs, Civil War anthems and 1950's pop crooning styles for ideas and melodies. Bold maneuvering to be sure, and Eastburn process just the right voice to make her tricks work. This is the sort of musical bravado that make one member of the Wu Tang syndicate proclaim Young People "The slipshod thrill of this approach wears a bit after awhile, but the power and spookiness of Young Poeple make these prayers deserve to be answered.


Updated 10/29/03
Video Links
YOUNG PEOPLE "War Prayers" RECORD RELEASE SHOW AT KNITTING FACTORY w/ LIARS, TV ON THE RADIO, WHITE MAGIC September 27 2003 at Knitting Factory. Click PUNKCAST!

WAR PRAYER REVIEWS

LOST AT SEA
Reviewed by Sarah Iddings
"Despite the valiant efforts of radio singles like "Feed the Tree" and "Cannonball", Belly's Star and the Breeders' Last Splash were not simple affairs. As the CDs gather dust in the wake of more familiar, less thought-inducing rock , the trying melodies and otherworldliness of these releases still impress those of us who can't idly gloss over innovation.

Young People's War Prayers sounds like a complete and total amalgam of those two albums, with a healthy does of Sonic Youth and Mirah thrown in for good measure. In fact, the likenesses are so strong, it's uncanny. From the rusty-bike squeal of "El Paso" to the minimalist, spare and danceable "Ne'er Do Well", we find a newly intriguing and ambitious follow-up for the band. Like Tanya Donelly's work, the songs are weird and ethereal but unafraid to rock. They are made intimately feminine due to the sweetly growling voice of Katie Eastburn, but each track is strikingly alien.

'Tamy Faye' is brooding but pretty, threatening with its persistent rumble. The warlike climate of 'Dutch Oven' and 'Rhumba' sheds all softness, led by strangely accessible, snappy drumming and a complicated sense of adventure. 'Stagecoach' has the distinction of being this album's 'Mad Lucas': a seemingly out-of-place, thouroughly bizarre track with a low and druggy glaze.

Every offering is an oddity among oddities, but ultimately surpassed by two cute: the closing 'The Night of the Hunger', in which sudden instrumental richness blends confusion with cohesion, and the suspiciously poppy 'The Lord', which throws you off the trail by flaunting an element of ease. A straight pop song amongst the clamor? Delightfully deceptive, and a lesson well-learned by those predecessors. War Prayers is unafraid to push well-learned by those predecessors. War Prayers is unafraid to push convention to the wayside and show complexity on its own smirking terms."


TIME OUT Show Review of their Record Release show!!! Click HERE.


GLIDE MAGAZINE
by Jesse Jarnow
Just when you decided to bop the next minimalist garage band that came along the pike with an over-sized cartoon mallet, along comes War Prayers by Young People. Their skronky guitar/free jazz drumz/wild vox lineup (the indie rock equivalent of a power trio) will inevitably be compared to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which is a darned shame, 'cause War Prayers is one of the best records of 2003. It took me about a dozen listens to realize that it was only 24 minutes long. Eleven songs. Needless to say, the songs are short. The songs, at least three or four of 'em, had been stuck in my head for some time, so I went back to see exactly how many choruses they could've possibly repeated to get 'em stuck like that. The answer, in most cases, was one. Which was a weird discovery to make. Is something a chorus if it's not repeated, or is it just a rather good hook?

Either way, it works. Like most of the tunes on the album, "Tammy Faye," the LP's second track, seems structured around Katie Eastburn's seemingly spontaneous vocal performance. As a singer, she seems to fit in the way Kim Gordon has tried to on later Sonic Youth recordings (specifically in her improvised vocals throughout their SYR EPs), except, well, Eastburn's a far more nuanced singer than Gordon. "Tammy Faye," then, feels like a continuous performance, as she flits around octave leaping melodies with abandon, Jeff Rosenberg's guitar tracking her flights. ('course, it's probably all meticulously rehearsed, which makes it even cooler.) The "take" builds and builds, 'til it releases into what obviously should be the chorus, signaled by a guitar dropout and the drums switching to a marching thrum: "We are all going, we are all goooOOOOing." And then it's over.

There's lots of playfulness about the disc, and virtually no sneering or posturing, which is what separates it from the rest o' them garage kids with shaggy haircuts. They're free to skip from totally joyous chaotic country romps ("The Lord") to avant-garde renditions of old folk tunes ("The Valley") to dreamy recitations ("Early Poetry") to rumbling stumbling marches ("Rhumba"). In this, Young People have achieved that rare balance between accessibility and experimentation. And yeah, yeah, yeah it's great.

PITCHFORK MEDIA
Young People
War Prayers
[Dim Mak; 2003]
Rating: 8.3
Drippy, rhapsodic and flaky, the second outing from former 5 Rue Christine art-rockers Young People sways seismically through spacious art-pop, patiently allowing bursts of pine-tar noise to emerge unannounced. Perhaps as the cookie-cutter hodgepodge of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs rightfully falls off the radar, more weary travelers will start tripping and shouting to the beautiful post-folk urban sprawl of War Prayers. Potentially excellent tour buddies for the equally ramshackle Baptist Generals, this coed trio (including ex-Pink & Brown skins-crasher Jeff Rosenberg) has an admirable unwillingness to tidy their songscapes. The ad hoc pace allows their chilled, alt-country Bow Wow Wow to time-lapse bloom into a John Cale in-house experiment redirected by anonymous cowboy junkies obsessing over The Raincoats. Loose-hewn fragments like pitted stars, "Rhumba" and "The Valley" masticate into homegrown improvisations during doped-up power outages; the stuttering movement between the roundtable Susanne Vega folkie singalong "Tammy Faye" and the reverb in spring of "Ne're Do Well" are a cloudburst of black-magic pick scratching, Sabbath guitar accents, and vocalist Katie Eastburn's powerful lullaby of a sing/shout, shout/sing.

Stylistically, Eastburn acts-out as a less-fancy Bj?rk on the wonderful "Stagecoach" where she manages to tread the line between on and off key while the factory-worker sounds her bandmates concoct rumble and hiss along the production line. She's also Chan Marshall's Wiccan sister moping through a slipshod buzz on "El Paso". Elsewhere, imagine an anonymous small-town jazz favorite awkwardly humming a meandering spiritual in a dive bar with ex-members of Pere Ubu and a drunken, bemused Richard Hell providing a strategic, sick-kid choir of burnouts and ill-sent bastards.

"The Lord" is a military/religious benchmark, exactly 60 seconds of bombastic celebratory pop riddled within horns, humming bees, and enough joyous cymbal splashes to loosen up even the most jaded of hipsters. It's one of many parade stoppers, a climactic grand finale in Cat Power: The Musical-- performed by nascent SpinArt stars Suddenly Tammy!-- when the young Amish woman playing a Dickensionian Chan Marshall unearths ultimate happiness in the self-mythologizing of her sadness during a crazed rollercoaster ride at nearby Hershey Park. She decides, in sotto vocco, at that very moment, to first buy some cotton candy and then take part in a vaguely understood, largely abstract music project she saw mentioned twenty years ago in a romantic pamphlet written by David Wojnarowicz.

As a whole, the eleven sprawling ragas on the War Prayers evoke high-school poetry, cool-ass soothsaying, dirty squats, Velvet Underground shadow puppets, and the hunger of John Fante. What's more important is that these really are prayers. The band's grubby tribal spirit may or may not supplant the sparkly succubus eyeliner dross regurgitated as porn-star-pabulum by the menagerie of Luxx regulars spoiling my local nightlife, but regardless the final results, Young People's contagious slow-core vibrancy and unwillingness to settle for an obvious post-punk narrative explodes their humble DIY into a wonderfully zealous act.
Brandon Stosuy, October 3, 2003

DUSTED MAGAZINE
Brooklyn ensemble Young People first made their mark on last year's self-titled debut (5RC), a collection of songs previously released as a cd r and a few new tunes. Singer Katie Eastburn's hauntingly beautiful and country-tinged vocals lent an exciting uniqueness to offbeat, eccentric folk-rock tunes. It was one of the most exciting debut albums of 2002, as well as one of the best all around recordings. Their new album, War Prayers was recently released by a new label, Dim Mak, and is now out in stores. Young People are beginning a nationwide tour, the dates for which are available here.


Jarrett:
1. X : Wild gift : This record doesn't have Ray Manzarek's organ interjections like their 1st LP Los Angeles did, though he did produce...i find the production to be a little more 'rustic' this time, if that makes sense. 'some other time' is one of my favorite songs they did. 'white girl' is on there, too. When I listen to this, I think, 'wow, there were a lot of good records that came out in 1981'. It makes me proud to be a sometime Angeleno, too.


2. Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks, 1959 : I think this movie is REALLY fucking good. Some people have a problem with John Wayne, but he made a lot of fine films, and with him here are Dean Martin (who gives an unexpectedly touching performance as the alcoholic deputy), Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson, Ward Bond, and Ricky Nelson. The character interactions are very human and warm in this movie, whereas in another Hawks movie, To Have and Have Not (with Bogart and Bacall), there's a lot more of the stylized 'snappy dialogue' going on, so it feels a bit more removed. despite a lot of dialogue, the films don't just feel like people standing around talking, though. Also, the lighting is not as unrealistic here as in some westerns, and inappropriate lighting to me can be annoying as fuck (see 'fail safe'), making some scenes a lot less believable. I still have not seen this movie from start to finish, only in pieces to the equivalent of three times through or so. This problem is plaguing me.


3. The Internet Movie Database : I spend hours on this thing looking up all sorts of shit, like what movies Bert Glennon photographed and what Phoebe Cates has been up to the last 10 or so years, then it's 5 in the morning all of a sudden.


Katie:
1. Teenage Girls : I've been hanging out with a group of girls aged 14-17 in Manhattan this summer. All five boroughs are represented in this group, and they are loud and sweet and beautiful and teaching me incredible dance moves, and they pump up my attitude such that I make Jeff mad with this 'tude. I'm a new resident of New York, so this is an awesome way to get acculturated. Plus I?m helping them make a play with lots of dance and song so it's all this fun for art and cheering crowds.


2. Roberta Flack. : No explanation necessary, but I?ve been listening to First Take, Quiet Fire, and Chapter Two nonstop, between Roy Orbison and Charles Mingus' New Tijuana Moods.


3. Roy Orbison : I saw a concert made for filming on PBS the other day with The Boss, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, KD Lang, Bonnie Raitt and all kinds of bigwigs making up his band; old dudes looking like they played with the real Elvis. But who cares about all of them when Roy is singing? please!


Jeff:
1. David Bowie : Hunky Dory : I listened to this record about 700 times in a row, albeit while drinking excessive amounts of caffeine, and became entirely obsessed, just more and more fascinated by what could have made Mr. Bowie take the leap of faith that he took both musically and image-wise to create such an otherworldly thing. God damn. It doesn't seem that out to lunch when you first hear it, but now whenever people are like "Hedwig and the Angry Inch duuuuude that's so weird and per-FOR-mative!" I think they really have not experienced this or Ziggy.


2. Television : "Venus (de Milo)" (from Marquis Moon) : When you stopped picking up your guitar and wasting an entire day trying to figure out the entire song from start to finish, wasn't that a sad day? I vacillate between wondering whether it is a lack of crafty and good guitar rock songs existing or my lack of inspiration or love for the instrument anymore. Really it's probably a combination of the two. And regardless, when i started listening to this song the other day I sat down and blew off two different meetings and three meals and sleep in order to get my head around it. I love it so much, and I also love how impromptu and laissez-faire everything sounds.


3. Boredoms : Vision Creation Newsun : Another leap of faith in musical history that probably has zero to do with faith and everything to do with insanity and "the groove." Why do bands forget about the pulse? Or the groove? Or rhythm?? Is it UNCOOL? I remember when everyone was hating on jam bands and Jane's Addiction and whatnot and there was a decided "anti-groove" movement going where it just seemed less important but really overall is there anything more than that (besides melody)? Boredoms always impress me no matter what they do, but this album is something I would spin at my own personal rave that I throw in the afterlife.


4. The Smiths : Strangeways Here We Come, and in general all of their recorded output, maybe with the exception of Meat is Murder : This band had all the subtlety of a drag queen on Quaaludes reciting the Norton Anthology. Yet, I guess that meant subtlety was on their side. At any rate, I grew up playing along with Johnny Marr guitar lines by ear and listening to Morrissey's storytelling and still love it all so dearly.
By Dusted Magazine

LIGHT UP THE SKY
Similar Artists: Cat Power, Bright Eyes, Sugarcubes
Rating: 7 out of 10
Young People are a rare gem that shine through the sometimes murky waters of alt-country/indie-folk. They've managed to successfully surprise fans of their debut LP with their newest follow-up entitled War Prayers. On the new album, their first venture with Dim Mak, they've landed themselves out of the pond of influences and into a territory much more inspired by their own means, and it shows.
For starters, the eleven songs on the disc all sufficiently stand apart from one another, ranging from Conor Oberst-style crooning numbers, like "Dutch Oven", to disjointed, lo-fi tunes like "The Lord". They can equally fit in with Suzanne Vega fans and those annoying Joan of Arc worshippers. The music also playfully whittles around from pots-and-pans style concoctions, like "Stagecoach", to downright sexy, Stereolab-esque songs like "Tammy Faye". A large part of the appeal can be tipped to guitarist Jeff Rosenburg for his eccentric guitar strumming, and drummer Jarrett Silberman's minimal poundings. But really, we love Katie Eastburn's Bjork-via-Chan Marshall style vocals the most. It's just so innocent and cute. It's also a surprise that at only a mere 24 and half minutes, the disc leaves you with the feeling of being full. Had another song been added, like a forced dessert after a perfect meal, it might have had you tipping over the bucket.
Overall, the band successfully convince you into wanting to know more about them, and with such a vast palette of influences to pull from, it all mixes into something lovingly original. War Prayers is a powerful album that pushes bountifully past its predecessor.
Reviewer: MA

NEUMU ONLINE
Young People's War Prayers On The Way

Avant-noise punks Young People will release their second longplayer, War Prayers, this September on Hollywood-based art/punk indie Dim Mak Records.

To tide fans over until then, the Brooklyn, N.Y., by way of Los Angeles, trio will release a 12-inch, Ne'er Do Well, on Hand Held Heart Records in early May, according to a press release.

The band put out their self-titled debut album on Kill Rock Stars' experimental label 5RC last year, offering the underground a one-of-a-kind discordant and distorted artsy punk sound highlighted by the distinctive, sorrowful and enormously carrying vocals of lead singer/writer/violinist Katie Eastburn. Young People's quiet/loud approach feels at times mournful and gospel-like, at others raging and thrashing.

"I grew up in the South, so that's where my influences come from religious music and country music and show tunes is where it's coming from. And classic rock," Eastburn, a native of Nashville, said during an interview with Neumu last fall.

Young People formed in January 2001 with anticipations of being a traditional stripped-down country/blues band, but once Eastburn's emotionally-powered songwriting and theatrical background met the no-rules, experimental and loud playing styles of bandmates Jeff Rosenberg (guitar) and Jarrett Silberman (drums), an ultra-raw, edgy sound all its own was born. "I write the vocal melodies in a vacuum like when I'm hiking or walking or driving, wherever," Eastburn said. "Then I'll just sing it to the boys and they create instrumentation around it. I have been a theatre and dance

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