Classic album: Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth

Colossal Youth is likely the least instantly complex album you’ll ever hear. Yet at one at the same time, it could very well also be the simplest and most addictive album to’ve graced your ears by the time you’ve reached the 31st playback. A mere glance at the monochrome album cover (left) would give a hint of that.

Cardiff’s Young Marble Giants are playing their debut (and only) album back in its entirety at ATP: The Fans Strike Back really quite soon, which means that there’s no better time than now to run a load of new converts through a true classic.

The harsh yet metronomic beats of ‘Searching For Mr. Right’ open Colossal Youth, setting the scene for a bass-framed, turn-peppered, termite-infested snapshot of loneliness. The creation of a defining solitude is simply masterful, and the effect of the break at around 2.13 is so as to throw the sound out into the open like a cold hard blow. ‘Credit In The Straight World’ couldn’t be more current, going for broke on timeless threads of popular culture and terminating in a sudden cut-off, subsisting through the posing of heavy syncopation against comforting quavers.

Wispy, tripped-out vocals feature thoughout, notably heavily on ‘Constantly Changing’ with the lyrics reflecting the instabilities of a world out of the voice’s control. The mammoth variation in sound on this album is remarkable, with ‘N.I.T.A’ sounding a little like Medieval plainsong through the eyes of Philip Glass and the Cocteau Twins. Mini-climaxes and flinchy deaths abound, it’s space-like and strangely disconcerting.

The title track is apoplectic, an apt and perhaps subconscious precursor to The Strokes. It’s also clear to see the influence of Young Marble Giants in the material of Maximo Park, namely in the techniques employed by Duncan Lloyd in ‘Books From Boxes’ and Archis Tiku in ‘A19′, the method of using the density of rhythms to deploy emotion.

‘Brand-New-Life’ potters along, luring the listener in via an oh-so-clever pastiche of other music, a reinvention of self-imposed standards with a slipping façade knocking against the protagonist’s nose until the winner finally makes himself known. ‘Wind In The Rigging’ is somehow epic, surely sampling the sound of switching the channel on an analogue portable TV from the ’80s.

The sound throughout is that of only a guitar, bass, vocals and drum-machine, and can be best described as wilfully teetering the line between under-produced and produced to pedantry. Not just that, but the drum machine was one that they assembled themselves from a set of diagrams in a geekish magazine. Rough Trade’s flagship darlings approach their impending apocalypse to truly skin-crawling effect, Alison Statton’s single-note phrases screaming their existences into some pole opposite the mainstream solipsism of the generation.

‘Include Me Out’ has a shufflier bass and a twangier guitar, setting its garagey motifs against each other. And the descending bass melodies on ‘Eating Noddemix’ sounds like voyeurism, somehow creating and sitting within the persona of someone overlooking a scene like a door into a personalityless commentator’s observations. ‘Wurlitzer Jukebox’ is altogether more frantic, sung from a new persona, a faux-cutesy one at that so as to hammer home just how much Statton’s sweet vocals are at odds with their own portrayal.

‘The Man Amplifier’ has a grainy, nigh on 12-bar-blues quality to it, a cinematic dichotomy of circus lines and solitude, whereas ‘Choci Loni’ is quite simply the poster boy for how Colossal Youth, an album so texturally bare, can succeed in having such grandiose ambitions.

‘Salad Days’ is Colossal Youth’s eyesore, with an even lower and more sinister bass. It’s astonishing that it’s part of the same piece as ‘The Taxi’, so ahead of its time and full of blips that it effectively synopsises Ratatat’s back catalogue in just over two minutes.

Both stark and emotionally interwoven, this album hasn’t lost any of its context; it’s precise, mechanical, wistful and limbering, and all within the confines of a limited palate. It’s a middle-class take on a decaying society, an album that exists within the vacuum/spacelessness of its reductionist yet unguarded background.

Bringing it back to the now, and seemingly in line with Gregorian chronology, artists spend longer and longer deliberating on how to add more instruments and tweak their interplay to perfection, but Colossal Youth is a masterclass in how to get the bare bones and make them hit like a timeless classic. And that it is.