WHAT RULES WEDNESDAY

The drums hit like a wave suddenly running vertically up a sea wall. Josh Levy isn’t yelling over the band, but it sounds close to it. The big sound carries into the chorus like a building being built on top of another building. What I’m trying to say here is Outro sounds massive. “Gila” is a giant footprint in the forest possibly from a mythical leg, or maybe normal animals can also just step down this widely.

The cymbals crash with purpose. The guitars strum with intention. Outro play with a directness to get to the point while toppling everything lesser than right here. The internal guitar work sounds like the veins moving from organ to organ that we can’t ever see. The bass follows those giant drums with a throbbing fever. This is the sound of what a headache feels like when quick pills don’t reduce the pressing in.

The hook of the chorus lining up with the size of the music delivers an impact that many bands try for, but don’t dynamically unhook large enough to actually accomplish. Outro sounds like a band that holds their songs up high, but loose as an old belt, so it can all flutter and sway enough to never feel like the insides of one of these tall buildings.

(Repeating Cloud)

I could get into all of the history and reasonings as to why I continue to check the pulse of Youth Lagoon with every new release, but hopefully you already know why, and if you don’t…start at the beginning and make your way to right now.

No one sings like Trevor Powers. From what I can hear, no one thinks exactly like Trevor Powers. There’s a mystery in how each song ends up how it is, that can’t be answered unless Powers were to explain it, but we don’t want it spelled out.

“Speed Freak,” arrives as the announcement single of a new album, after a slowly boiling pot of singles began bubbling throughout last year.

This new song frames Powers’ wizard-afraid-in-a-cave voice blended with the grate of a synthetic keyboard line that growls more than it hums, and a drum beat that draws a map only to change when the pattern seems to finally make sense.

The directness of the hi-hat and the snare are only complicated by the skitter in the way the drums are played which models something about how Youth Lagoon actually works. It’s music that appeals on the surface because it sounds good and it could stay that simple. But Powers is in the back rooms and basements developing alter egos to the exact moments already playing. The underlying chiming of something mirroring the beat, but like a train that won’t get to the next destination. Half way through when the beat just gets left and everything else fades for a moment, it’s a needed space to collect all of the pieces already presented from the beginning. There are samples of garbled text being spoken. There’s the sound of an old tv powering on with that frequency that almost makes the middle of the brain feel sick. And Powers finally gets to the “speed freak” confession and immediately ends the song. It’s a loop of a beat and the carefully chosen keyboard line that could play forever unattended and everyone would listen on and on and on. But the power of Powers is the methodical resonance in the deeper layers of carefully placing sounds molded into the form, and then the voice, like no one else, singing things that are maybe too painful or honest to truly grapple with when the origins of this landscape sound so easy.

(Fat Possum)

There’s a lot going on when “Crowded Streets” kicks in. The bass is wriggling like a too big fish on a too small lure. The guitars are heating like a rash of butter on crisped toast. And the vocals, like the drums, sound like gusts over the surface of everything else. It sounds like a street full of people and there isn’t a direct path to walk past it all. There’s a busyness to all of it, but everything organized into clean places.

It isn’t a heap, it’s a palace being constructed.

The end finds the same few guitar notes being picked out again and again as the band heats and warms that place to allow for the notes to sail the song to a big finishing hit. It’s the open path to walk past the shops and people making all of the racket, but every single person is individually someone standing not in a heap, but a shadow. Exploding Flowers delivers a quick introduction to a new album with what sounds like a sculpture made of millions of chipped pieces glued into place, for now.

(Meritorio Records)