Youngsters: Three Los Angeles refugees miss their cars.

| 11 Nov 2014 | 11:36

    When I sit down with the Young People, I immediately look at their hands. From the dark, expansive tracks on this trio’s 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.

    They’re not. They’re spotless. From where I’m 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 wasn’t involved in music. They’re 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 city’s 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 Eastburn’s 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 it’s ours to keep

    Oh, maybe it’s 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, it’s grounded in American traditional music—bluegrass, country, blues—but is still off-centered and unpredictable.

    "Any good band will create a landscape you’ll need to learn to navigate," says Rosenberg.

    Eastburn recalls a soundman in Albuquerque describing their music: "‘It’s 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.

    "It’s not like we’re 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 canon—which track he won’t say.

    "The beauty of having a car is it’s like having a little studio," Eastburn says. "I would just turn off the radio and open my mouth." She’d record the lines and melodies on a tape recorder before bringing them to practice.

    "In New York, you just can’t do that," she says. Eastburn hasn’t 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. It’s 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 I’m a horrible purist," says Silberman.

    "Jarrett wouldn’t watch that version," Eastburn added.

    "God. Colorized movies look fucking horrible, I think we can all agree on that," says Silberman. "I’m sure we can find a proper black-and-white copy of that film out here."