A band that have been called more names than Gordon Ramsay’s sous chef and have a sound for every one of them.
YOUM (as they will be referred to for the rest of this exhortation but previously known as Youthmovies, YMSS and Youth Movie Soundtrack Strategies) hail from the eternally effervescent town of Oxford. (I am unsure what happens to the river Thames as it flows through Oxford but someone should study the process and do the same to all British rivers potentially making the biggest contribution to music since Leo Fender’s father said to his wife, ‘shall we have an early night?’.) Over the past few years YOUM have gained a reputation for incendiary live performances and a continuously developing sound. To define the magnificent din they make under any one, two or a dozen genres would not only be impossible but would also be an injustice. To understand who they are or where they are going would be a similar feat, but fortunately for us all we only need to listen to one song to understand the brilliance of YOUM, ‘If you’d seen a battlefield’.
This song is to post rock/Post Hardcore/Math what Bohemian Rhapsody was to 80s pop or Paranoid Android was to 90’s progression. It runs at almost 8 minutes, each minute a song in itself, and each different to the last, it surfs so close to the possibility of becoming noise that you have to step back every so often and realise that it is everything but. This is helped in part by, Andrew Mears’ Albarn-esque voice creating a bridge between music as we know it and whatever astral plane this song came from. Incidentally Mears was the original singer for fellow Oxfordites Foals but gave up the position in the band to work with YOUM. Those of you lucky enough to have heard Foals’ original 7” release Look at My Furrows of Worry/Try This on your Piano with Mears’ as lead singer will have noticed that these tracks further bridge the gap between these two bands.
It is rare that a band is called ‘brave’ with any real justification but it is a perfect and commonly used adjective to describe YOUM. Where Foals could perhaps be accused of prettying up the scene to soften the blow for the larger market YOUM do anything but. You really get a sense that this band are really doing things for their own reasons and personal motivations and this has got to be where great music comes from.
Regardless of whether this band spend the rest of their lives sampling the mating calls of dust mites or selling Coca-Cola to orphans they have a warm bed made up for them in rock heaven purchased by ‘If you’d seen a battlefield’.
If you are a fan of Foals or similar and would like to further your knowledge of this exploding and fascinating scene or even if you have no idea what I’m talking about IOHO strongly recommends the album Good Nature by YouthMovies.
YOUM are currently recording new material for release in 2010
IOHO recommends the tracks:
Soandso & Soandso and If you’d seen a battlefield
Websites:
http://www.myspace.com/whyyoum
If you’d seen a battlefield
Please Listen and Vote
Tags: albarn, Battlefield, Blood, blur, Foals, Good, hardcore, If, Jonquil, Math, Mears, Movie, Nature, Oxford, post, post hardcore, radiohead, Red, rock, Seen, Shoes, Soundtrack, Strategies, yannis, YMSS, You'd, YOUM, Youth, YOuthMovie, zodiac
