YOUTH LAGOON - Rarely Do I Dream

Over the years, the music of Youth Lagoon, the main project of Trevor Powers (Idaho, 1989), has undergone substantial mutations. The catchy bedroom pop melodies of the debut, “The Year Of Hibernation” (Fat Possum/Lefse, 2011), soon gave way to the Animal Collective-style psychedelic atmospheres of “Wondrous Bughouse” (Fat Possum, 2013), marking the shift from an intimate Youth Lagoon to a more cosmopolitan one. In both cases, reception from critics specializing in indie-alternative production was good, if not enthusiastic. Two years later came the transitional album, “Savage Hills Ballroom” (Fat Possum, 2015), the one where Trevor Powers' youthful, almost androgynous voice began to come into focus, gaining the dignity of an element standing on its own rather than just accompanying the instrumentation. Having set aside the muffled bedroom atmosphere and the deranged lysergic trips, the sound became clean and refined, settling into a more direct pop, though still open to electronic flourishes that were at times aggressive and unsettling.

Then, silence. Over the following eight years Powers devoted himself to side projects, declaring the Youth Lagoon story over for good. A deep psycho-physical crisis, however, made the unpredictable possible: the resurrection of an artistic entity that re-emerged in unprecedented forms. “Heaven Is A Junkyard” (Fat Possum, 2023), in fact, with its delicate atmospheres, played with the lightest touch of pick and drumstick, placed Youth Lagoon for the first time on the map of American soft-rock.

Sonically, the latest “Rarely Do I Dream” follows the path traced by its predecessor, once again relying on the production of Rodaidh McDonald (Jamie xx, Sampha, Daughter, King Krule, XX). That sense of unease and anxiety typical of Powers' poetics since his debut is still present, but this time it's wrapped in a domestic, practically private atmosphere. The discovery of a shoebox containing family VHS tapes is in fact the source from which the inspiration for the twelve new tracks springs.

Halloween pumpkins lighting up at dusk on an American October evening, visions of almost mythological animals – as in the claustrophobic, sinister march of the electronic "Speed Freak" – a ball rolling across the lawn, children playing detective near the tracks of a stretch of railway forgotten by God, somewhere in Idaho, as in a Stephen King novel. These are the realistic yet also somewhat dreamlike and at times visionary images that the songs on “Rarely Do I Dream” guard with jealous nostalgia. The whole thing is harmoniously seasoned with audio snippets extracted, almost archaeologically, from the Powers family's original tapes, which in some ways recall the narrative approach of Killers on “Pressure Machine”, where the authentic voices of the souls of Nephi, Utah, Brandon Flowers' hometown, introduced tales of deep American provinciality. In “Rarely Do I Dream”, however, the town remains a backdrop, the context in which Powers grew up alongside his enormous family and in which the young American's musical phenomenology took shape. The epicenter of his art lies instead in the perceptions, visions, memories and emotional and psychic tremors of the author, accompanied by a sound never so meticulous, multifaceted and ambitious in Youth Lagoon's history.

On Powers' latest work there is melodic intuition – especially in the first half of the record, as on "Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)" and "Football" – repetition, the delicacy of the more jazzy moments, sinister electronic incursions, and at times an almost cinematic tension typical of certain American films of the Nineties, as on the closing "Home Movies (1989-1993)", where the voice of Powers' mother urges little Trevor to repeat for the camera a phrase that probably encapsulates the meaning of nearly forty minutes of music: “This is the Trevor's story”.

From the bedroom to the world, from the world to the town, from the town to the family home: this is the arc of Youth Lagoon, a meteor of the indie scene that, luckily for us, has never lost its way, but has instead grown up, and, judging by this latest record, has never flown so high.

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15/06/2025