Godina izdanja: 2015
Žanr: Elektronska muzika
Poreklo: Strani izvođač
Izdavač: XL Recordings

Made in the UK.
Nov cd, u celofanu.
CD in standard jewel case with card slipcase.

Label: XL Recordings – XLCD674
Format: CD, Album
Country: UK
Released: Apr 6, 2015
Genre: Electronic
Style: Synth-pop

Culture of Volume is the second album by the British electronic musician East India Youth, released 6 April 2015 on XL Recordings.

East India Youth: Culture of Volume review
– experimental pop with a very basic appeal

William Doyle’s second album as East India Youth further proves his exceptional skill for marshalling strange, intriguing ideas into coherent, accessible pop music.

William Doyle’s first album as East India Youth was a pretty curious thing. It just wouldn’t sit still, jumping from Berlin-era Bowie to brutal electronics to dance music to Looking for Someone, the cascading harmonies of which suggested Fleet Foxes forced to abandon their instruments and make music on a laptop. By rights, Total Strife Forever should have sounded like what it ultimately was: a collection of ideas thrown together on the side by a musician whose band – Doyle and the Fourfathers, who specialised in precisely the kind of amiable-but-unremarkable indie-rock that provides the ballast on BBC 6 Music – was in the process of falling apart. But it didn’t, largely because Doyle seemed uncommonly good at whatever he tried his hand at. Listening to it, you could see why leftfield music website the Quietus felt impelled to start its own record label in order to release East India Youth’s debut EP. More surprising was that Total Strife Forever ended up gaining the kind of mainstream attention that seldom befalls artists championed by the Quietus: a Mercury prize nomination has, alas, proved unforthcoming for Acting the Rubber Pig by Daniel Patrick Quinn, or Chrononautz’s Public Domain Fuckover Series.

Despite Total Strife Forever’s success, you might reasonably expect Doyle to try to rein it in a bit on Culture of Volume, which, if it isn’t quite a major-label debut, still sees Doyle exchanging Jeff the Brotherhood and Bo Ningen for Adele and Radiohead as labelmates. Indeed, in at least one interview, he’s claimed that he tried to do so, but things didn’t work out that way. “The end result is not what was in mind,” as the first lyric you hear puts it. It’s the opening line of a sparkling, extremely commercial pop song, which arrives hot on the heels of The Juddering: a five-minute instrumental that begins as a homage to the intro of David Bowie’s Station to Station, progresses through a section of electronic noise that wouldn’t sound out of place on a track by hard-edged techno producer Perc, then finally resolves into beautiful, cavernous-sounding ambience, its beatific mood unsettled by the chattering, agitated synth line that runs through it. Elsewhere, stuff that feels like a deeply idiosyncratic update of 80s synthpop and songs that it really isn’t a stretch to imagine in the current top 40 – Turn Away, Beaming White – crash against gusts of experimentation. The melody of Manner of Words gives out midway through the track, replaced by a fuzzy, woozy drone, and Entirety, an instrumental audibly influenced by the Underworld of Rez or Spikee, is superseded by the gorgeous, Scott Walkerish high-drama balladry of Carousel, which itself arrives complete with a finale in which the lushly romantic arrangement becomes distorted and harsh.

Hearing an artist gushing with ideas is enormously pleasing in itself, particularly at a time when young singer-songwriters seem to arrive equipped with only one, which frequently turns out to be: sound as much like you’re recording in 1974 as is physically possible. More impressive still is how good at marshalling his ideas Doyle seems to be – for all that you’re never quite certain what Culture of Volume is going to do next, it never sounds ragged or incoherent. Nor does it ever feel like the kind of exercise in smart-arsed affectation that enables people who like smart-arsed affectation in music to apply the prefix “meta” to it: behold my ingenious generic juxtapositions, everyone, aren’t I clever? Instead, it connects with listeners on a very basic, emotional level. It’s not just that the melody and lyrics of Carousel are really moving; it’s that the shift from the preceding track’s dancefloor euphoria to this song’s epic melancholy amplifies its effect. It doesn’t feel jarring, largely because Carousel’s lyrics appear to be about the fleeting nature of euphoria: “We heard the sound creaking loud, a crooked frame circling us / We strain to learn just how it turns round.” For all the shininess of their melodies, there’s more to Beaming White and Turn Away than appealing surface gloss: there is a real pull to the words.

Doyle is an artist who evidently doesn’t see an unabashed love of pop music as antithetical to experimentation, who doesn’t get why wanting your music to be smart should automatically lead it being an arid intellectual exercise, and who doesn’t feel the need to stick within a clearly defined genre. That this stuff seems notable rather than commonplace perhaps tells you more about the current musical era than it does about East India Youth. But context isn’t everything. It’s not that William Doyle wants to do interesting and laudable things. It’s that, on the evidence of Culture of Volume, he’s really good at doing them.