Title: Skeleton Jar Label: Ivy League/Slanted File Under: Legends building masterworks RIYL: Think the pop of The Posies, the articulate desire of The Red House Painters, the rock of The Pixies, the angst of Placebo and the possibilities of The Smashing Pumpkins. At last - 4 months into the year an album finally worth being excited about. Like all things Youth Group, this album comes under the cover of night, underrated by a populace training their gag reflexes on the guitar cocks of Jet et al. Three years after their sensational debut, and following the departure of longtime member Andy Cassell (spot the irony - he manages The Vines), the band have reformatted, reformulated and reintegrated their musical vision. This time, it's dangerous. If the darkened cover and alienated art work don't tip you early, this is a dark album. Gone are the well-lit celebrations of Urban & Eastern, and gone also are the 8 minute plus slabs of epic guitar swordplay. Tightened, taut even, but with the unmistakable melancholic voice of Toby Martin remaining pure and potent, it's as if trauma has shown them the only way out of hell is to make their own. It all starts with a drumbeat, a jangly Birds-like guitar wrangle, and then Martin comes over, "lost in this purgatory", and finally the full engine roar comes in for the chorus, "Shadowland", the song's title, repeated over and over, with only a sliver of hope "I want to float upon the memories, not sink into the gloamy (or is it gloomy?) Seas" and finished with a confirmation, an embracing of the possibility. "Last Quarter" is more bombastic, youth radio friendly and maybe the least successful of the eleven tracks, if only for the lack of entries and possibilities the song's standard structure enforces. "When everything's gone at least you've got nothing that holds on." It's wry poetry that rules in "Lillian Lies", Martin's voice narrating the tale of a lost girl on a lost bus in a lost life, "the sky doesn't cover, it swallows" a warning voice for us all. "Baby Body" is pretty enough, all acoustic slidings, until again the vocal kicks in with "Liz hates her body, her baby body." Lou Reed is in the house, except the house is a shoddy low-rent shack in the outer Sydney suburbs and we're scrambling to find change for a loaf of bread. On the next track, "Drowned", "all my optimism's drowned, yeah I'm drowned" is sung seductively until feedback-laden chords swamp the message that "hope is all we've got left." Perhaps the beauty of this album is that every note seems well-placed, every strum thought through, economic in the precision of the pop-coated anger. The songs give you no chance to get lost, and no chance to escape their tales and tunes. These aren't melodies played by rote, Martin's narrations never sink to the cheap rhyming populism of say Paul Kelly. Instead each thrust seems to affirm Youth Group's existence, even under the weight of their fractured experience. "I feel like hell; you feel like dancing." Irony, anger, despair and a howled plead for survival - it's all here, and the sad, mad thing is that from the stinking maggot-crawling cesspool that is Sydney, something, in it's hurt, has emerged to shine a clearer light on our lives, on the conceivabilities of Australian music, on the redemptive powers of rock even in the pits of our own desperation. In an age of pop idols, false idols and the harlots, pimps and whores of the music industry, Youth Group with Skeleton Jar have raised their middle finger. Fuck you has never sounded so good.
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