Youthmovies – 'Good Nature' review
It is still January, and the evenings will get lighter, and darken again, before the year is out. But all the same, this LP could potentially be an album of the year. But that’s a big ‘could’ – it all depends on whether anyone can fully get their head around what the hell takes place across these 61 minutes of noise within the next eleven months.
On first listen, Good Nature is a dense, perplexing mess, the musical equivalent of a particularly intense Vicky Pollard monologue. Full of unintelligible mantras and screams, drones, mood swings and slogans, euphoria, depression, anger and terror, all often simultaneously, this is at Ulysses/Mulholland Drive levels of confusing. It’s a teenager’s bedroom of a record: everything is on display, all over the floor, spilling out of drawers, pinned to the wall, with every item as instantly obvious to its curator as it is obscured from its observer. At more that an hour in length, this kind of record should be irritatingly unlistenable, overly superior, uninviting and smug – and, occasionally, it is.
But thankfully Good Nature has one huge saving grace: with every completed listen there’s an overwhelming urge to hit play again, instantly, if not for pleasure then simply to understand a little more. Like asking a magician to repeat a sleight of hand, the album’s riddles slowly unravel with every rotation, so that alongside the noisenik outbursts and swathes of experimental fuzz there appears a beautiful trumpet figure or a tiny, hidden four-bar tune. Little by little, seemingly random mid-song tempo, key and even genre changes start assuming patterns that become satisfyingly recognisable. Listens become like treasure hunts, equally revealing and frustrating, but the fog starts to lift to reveal a carefully conceived and painstakingly constructed rock album with often brilliant playing and diverse themes.
Of course, just because an album is hard work, it doesn’t mean it’s good – often when the songs reveal themselves, they simply reveal naive, overambitious, overlong noodles. However, for every miscue (and there are a few here that betray the youth of their creators with crass lyrics and overdependence on production gimmickry), there is a complex, warm and beautiful composition of serious worth. It may be tough-going, frequently overreach itself and be in desperate need of a good editor, but for a debut album Good Nature is a staggering piece of work. Ballsy, massively ambitious, exuberant and endlessly fascinating, it could just take over the world, if only enough people learn how to speak its language.
8/10
