Total Strife Forever
13 January 2014
Stolen Recordings
4 stars out of 5
William Doyle adopted the name East India Youth in reference
to the East India Docks area of East London ,
where he lived while writing Total Strife
Forever (a pun on Total Life Forever, the second album by Foals). The album, a mixture of ambient works, techno tracks, and proper
synthpop songs, was nominated for the 2014 Mercury Prize. Picture a more
adventurous Owen Pallett without the control freak tendencies. East India Youth
offers instrumental pieces as fully-fledged compositions rather than as bridges
between the “real” songs on the album, something that sets him apart from his
fellow art pop/one-man-band performers.
“Dripping Down” is a classic art pop song, one of the few
tracks on the album to feature vocals, that at first seems incongruous given
the two ambient tracks preceding it. But following it is the techno romp of “Hinterland,”
making it clear that Total Strife Forever
is no easily pigeonholed collection. “Heaven, How Long” is pure New Romantic,
and while that might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it works in the context of
the album. Doyle channels his inner Thom Yorke on the beatless “Song for a
Granular Piano,” a piece that swells and rolls through waves of piano before
falling apart into surface noise glitch.
TSF is one of
those albums that does a very good job of mimicking an important and innovative
album even if it isn’t actually one itself. Is the tradition of the
one-man-band with keyboard and loop machine already so entrenched that several
of its recurring motifs have already become crystallized tropes? If so, then
Doyle (along with, perhaps, SOHN) is at the front of that first wave of
imitators. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: some of the best music of
post-punk, for example, came in its first wave of copycats. It remains to be
seen if on future albums Doyle will forge a more distinct identity, but even
though his present identity is still somewhat lost in the wave, the music of
East India Youth is still pleasing nonetheless.
reviewed by Richard Krueger
No comments:
Post a Comment