Young Prisms – Friends For Now (2011)

Young Prisms – Friends For Now (2011)

Favorit za debi album 2011,San Francisko baby!!!

If ‘slacker’ means ‘purveyor of angst-ridden badass psychedelic rock,’ then the Young Prisms qualify. Five such slackers comprise this band: Jason Hendardy, Jordan Silbert, Matt Allen, Stef Hodapp, and Gio Betteo. Silbert is the old man, at twenty-four, and all five recently dropped out of various unsatisfying academic situations— from media arts programs to master‘s track.

What they did instead is they moved into a roach infested apartment above a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District and started pumping out dark, driving rhythms overlaid with melodies that pulse and build and then break over you. Out of this small dwelling, the five members shared a living, practicing and recording space and held seances in hopes of invoking the Mission District’s legendary artistic spirits. The result, some of the best stuff coming out of a city exploding with brilliant new music, and more concretely a debut LP, “Friends For Now”.

The group’s lyrics, which you’ll have to do your best to decipher, are laced with a kind of nonchalance (I’m thinking of one song off the new LP called “If You Want To,” as in “whatevs”) that devolves quickly into a grim, passionate poetry part My Bloody Valentine, part Sonic Youth, part Charles Bukowski, part some kind of uncategorizable sparkly ecstasy. Whoa.

So consider this a warning issued with an inviting grin: this music will make you want to drop acid and become a recluse. Or it will make you even less excited to work your shitty day job. Or it will make you jump up and down in a dark crowded room while your eardrums bleed. Or it will make you feel something secret like happiness, minus any sentimental whimsicality. Or it will make you want to read Sarte, or graphic comic books, or maybe Hunter Thompson. And in one hundred years when people want to know what it felt like to be young on the West Coast in the early new millennium, they might just put on this record, by these rising kings (and queen) of Psychedelic Slackerdom.

Young Prisms debut full-length album ‘Friends For Now’ is out January 18th on the Kanine label. For self-proclaimed slackers, Young Prisms has kept busy having released an EP on Mexican Summer in late 2009 (sold out), followed by split 7 inches with former roomies Weekend (Transparent UK), Small Black (Big Love JP), and Mathamagic (Atelier Ciseaux FR) in 2010.