(Review from Tiny Mixed Tapes) On his countless CD-Rs, 12-inches, and cassettes, as well as collaborations with the likes of Matthew Bower of Skullflower, Neil Campbell of Vibracathedral Orchestra, and the telepathic Simon Wickham-Smith, Richard Youngs has helped to provide what The Wiredescribed as “the map co-ordinates for much of what passed for a post-punk UK underground during much of the 80′s and 90′s.” He can do achingly beautiful mantras of loss, as on Sapphie; chromium space odes to Jack Kirby, as on hismid-2000s Jagjaguwar releases; windy electroacoustic improvisations; obscurefaux-airs; and, most recently, Residents-style weirdo-pop on his last Jagjaguwar album, Beyond the Valley of the Ultrahits. He played bass with Jandek at the legendary recluse’s first-ever live performances, on the confident and sensitive Glasgows Sunday and Monday, and on Newcastle Sunday. On his latest for Jagjaguwar, Amplifying Host, Youngs takes yet another stylistic turn, this time into hermetic outsider folk-rock.
Youngs’ music sounds broken here, but as with Jandek’s utterly unique take on rock ‘n’ roll, its brokeness creates a sound that is thrillingly expressive in its difficulty. Alongside Youngs’ anxious, distracted acoustic guitar picking, the most characteristic sound of this album is a damaged electric guitar, pealing its mournful, inarticulate song again and again. While the electric guitar on his last recording, the limited-edition Inceptor, produced torrents of magnificent, lacerating noise, the guitar on Amplifying Host sounds either seriously broken or has undergone some profound trauma, as if it has been left with a single twisted string, able to produce only one note at a time, ambivalent and bent, bouncing away like a broken spring. This bend in the guitar string, this shape in time, is a motion Youngs seems compelled to repeat. Is it perhaps a meditation? Or a compulsion born of trauma?
