You could call it the persistence of silence. Few records have hung
around on my stereo, of recent, for as long as Young People's second
longplayer (which, at 24 minutes, ain't exactly lengthy), and perhaps
this is because the Los Angelean-cum-Brooklynite trio know that silence
is a rhythm, too, and, thus they cast it as the lead instrument on War
Prayers. Well, like, almost. It's Katie Eastburn's singing that is
placed out front of the band, and it's Katie Eastburn's singing that
defines the band; she, in many respects, being the essence and existence
of the band, itself, as entity. But, behind her, there are gaping holes
of nothingness, and it's in this space that Young People's aesthetic is
born; the desolate stretches of silence providing fertile grounds in
which their strangely charming music grows. The band're basically
making some sort of noisy rock-club take on postmodernist folk music,
but they're certainly not folkies; their songs raze the wooded wonder
and idyllic meadows of folk songs, tearing away all extraneous
instrumentage and counterproductive counter-melodies, rendering their
new-millennial landscapes in the most barren palettes: all traffic smog,
fluorescent light buzz, and the lurch and grind of mechanized
machinery. In rendering people's song in such grim depiction, Young
People speak less of history, and more of this moment in time. Even
this record's title takes its historical meaning — inspiration sourced
from Civil War ballads — and gives it immediate topicality, these
prayers now delivered as laments for the sanctioned belligerence
currently reigning in the home of the brave. To the accompaniment of
rudimentary percussion, squalls of noisy guitar, and, on rare occasions,
some combination thereof, Eastburn sings lyrics inspired by folk songs,
ballads, marches, war hymns, odes of praise, blues laments, and
stage-musical soliloquies. But as she draws on the elements of popular
song from the past couple hundred years, the singer doesn't evoke past
peoples, past song forms, or past environs; rather, she evokes the
current musical interest in such forms that has crept into even the most
unlikely musician's repertoires of recent. With their noise guitar,
avant-gardist approach, and predilection for setting Eastburn's spotlit
singing on a stark stage, Young People are never going to resemble a
Shirley & Dolly Collins record. As band, they are not romantics,
yearning for a simpler time before the industrial revolution changed the
face of modern society and the face of modern man. Their juxtaposition
of these words, in this musical setting, in this time and place, is
showing how such song form can be reinterpreted and reassembled in a
strictly metropolitan setting, these words prayers for those living and
working in the here and now, and not for those souls long lost.
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