Youngsters: Three Los Angeles refugees miss their cars.
When I sit down with the Young People, I immediately look at their hands. From the dark, expansive tracks on this trios self-titled first album on 5 Rue Christine (Kill Rock Stars experimental sister label), I expect them to be ruddy, cracked and stained with dirt from working the fields, where blood and bones have faded into the soil unnoticed for generations.
Theyre not. Theyre spotless. From where Im sitting in the temporary Brooklyn home of Katie Eastburn, whose haunting vocals hold together the temperamental, fragmented instrumentation of Jarrett Silberman and Jeffrey Rosenberg, the band looks good and well-rested. Nonetheless, my rough, bucolic vision of them is the sort of reverie their music triggers.
The Young People are recent L.A. emigres. Rosenberg and Silberman have ties to several West Coast bands, including Pink and Brown and Uphill Gardeners. Eastburn danced with the Janet Pants Dans Theater out there, but wasnt involved in music. Theyre biding their time in New York until late April when they begin a U.S. tour with Liars, followed by European dates in June. Some are surprised to find them in New York, but for them it just made sense.
"It was just time for me to come back to the East Coast," says Eastburn, a Nashville native, who went to school in Rhode Island. "Jeff and I have been gypsies for a long time."
"A citys just another city," Rosenberg adds.
The band came together in January 2001, with the idea of forming a country band but, as Eastburn explains, "In our first practice we realized it was not a country band at all."
The Young People became something entirely different. Their sound is that of a small crowd trickling through a room, picking up an electric guitar here, a violin there. Feedback swells, a few feverish chords are strummed, a kick drum is stomped, then stops and disappears; the doors and windows are open, the furniture creaks, dishware falls to the floor. At the center of this is Eastburns keening. Her stark lyrics on "Ron Jeremy" lead to this type of place:
Wasted all this time
Come along and put out the light
Maybe its ours to keep
Oh, maybe its ours to keep
Locked up in a drawer
In a safe far beneath the floor
Lay me down to sleep
Oh, lay me down to sleep
All of this sounds familiar, though. Melodically, its grounded in American traditional musicbluegrass, country, bluesbut is still off-centered and unpredictable.
"Any good band will create a landscape youll need to learn to navigate," says Rosenberg.
Eastburn recalls a soundman in Albuquerque describing their music: "Its borderline noise, but a little better."
"We really liked that comment," she deadpans.
They recorded their second album in January, which they expect to see released later this year. Each member plays each instrument, trading electric guitar, bass, violin and drums according to the track. The songs, which came together over the last year of touring, have more discernible structure and depart from the down-tempo dirges on their first album: galloping drums, vocal melodies stretching beyond the earlier influences into distinct, almost playful hooks. Eastburn even chats with children on one track, before horns roll them over.
"Its not like were these sullen motherfuckers all the time," Silberman laughs.
One L.A. influence leans heavily on their music: driving.
"We all had cars and we listened to a lot of classic rock radio," Silberman says. For the new album, the band ripped one beat directly from the classic rock canonwhich track he wont say.
"The beauty of having a car is its like having a little studio," Eastburn says. "I would just turn off the radio and open my mouth." Shed record the lines and melodies on a tape recorder before bringing them to practice.
"In New York, you just cant do that," she says. Eastburn hasnt tried this on the subway yet. One can imagine her appearance on a Code Orange-clenched 6 train triggering a panic: lulling through a solemn melody, she could easily be mistaken for an angel sent down to lead us through the Tribulation.
The Young People swiped their name from a Shirley Temple film about vaudeville performers who inherit a baby (Temple) at the end of a performance. The family chooses to raise the child in a simple country town, only to be snubbed by the locals who look down on show people. Its a strange parable for a band whose interpretations of traditional music reflect a typically urban isolation. The members admit they have yet to see the movie.
"We were going to rent it in L.A., but they only have the colorized version and Im a horrible purist," says Silberman.
"Jarrett wouldnt watch that version," Eastburn added.
"God. Colorized movies look fucking horrible, I think we can all agree on that," says Silberman. "Im sure we can find a proper black-and-white copy of that film out here."