EAC Rip | FLAC (tracks, cue, log) – 185 MB
34:33 | Alternative, Indie, Dream Pop, Psychedelic Pop | Label: Fat Possum
After an 8 year hiatus, Youth Lagoon return with their 4th album, ‘Heaven Is a Junkyard’. Youth Lagoon – the beloved project of Trevor Powers – returns with the announcement of Heaven Is a Junkyard, his first new album in eight years, out June 9th on Fat Possum, and a new single/video, ” Idaho Alien.” With whispers of country, Heaven Is a Junkyard is mutant Americana in a world of love, drugs, storytelling, and miracles-held together by Powers’ voice and an upright piano. In Powers’ own words, ” Heaven Is a Junkyard is about all of us. It’s stories of brothers leaving for war, drunk fathers learning to hug, mothers falling in love, neighbors stealing mail, cowboys doing drugs, friends skipping school, me crying in the bathtub, dogs catching rabbits, and children playing in tall grass.”
After a strong run between 2010 and 2016, Idaho-bred musician Trevor Powers temporarily ceased making music as Youth Lagoon, the nostalgic and psychedelically tinged bedroom pop project with which he’d created three critically acclaimed albums. Heaven Is a Junkyard marks Powers’ return to the Youth Lagoon moniker, continuing the clearer production he left off with on 2015’s Savage Hills Ballroom, and leaning into gentler, almost Americana-styled instrumentals that seem born from grounded emotional states. Soft piano intermingles with found sounds, samples, laid-back drum grooves, and occasional unobtrusive electronic elements throughout the album as Powers spins opaque lyrics about troubled families, open skies, and images that evoke the feeling of life in the heartland. This formula becomes its own kind of flyover pop on the album’s best songs, with “Idaho Alien” and “Prizefighter” coming one after another and feeling like continuations of each other’s affable hooks and softly melancholic melodic sensibilities. Stripped down ballad “The Sling” consists mainly of piano and lonely vocals before a haunted chorus and stirring strings come in to push the song’s wounded feel to its conclusion. There are still hints of the washed-out nostalgia of earlier Youth Lagoon material in the cloudy glow of ambient interlude “Lux Radio Theater” or the distant drum loops and wobbly lo-fi processing of “Mercury,” but by and large Heaven Is a Junkyard finds Powers in a pastoral mode. Even in its most orchestrated moments, the album feels primarily reflective and still, like Powers is gazing out on a silent field of wheat and offering us a look into his brain as the thoughts, memories, and scattered hopes all float by.
Tracklist
1 Rabbit
2 Idaho Alien
3 Prizefighter
4 The Sling
5 Lux Radio Theatre
6 Deep Red Sea
7 Trapeze Artist
8 Mercury
9 Little Devil from the Country
10 Helicopter Toy