Ramble On

I have been listening to the Youth Lagoon album "The Year of Hibernation" at work a lot while burning through piles of transcripts and request e-mails. I find it uplifting and helpful when I need to rise above the tedium. One of my few complaints with the album is that I can't readily understand what the lead singer is saying and I'm a very lyrically-driven listener. The songs on this album are similarly structured and usually start quiet, progressively adding layers of sound, instruments, and volume. They are built around major chord structures and so it's a positively dreamy album, a la Camera Obscura, except with falsetto male vocals and less retro sound. Good driving beats on the toms too. It's not what I would listen to to get my engine running in the morning but it's a great background soundtrack, as I have mentioned already. So today during a spare moment when I was marvelling at the beautiful sonic swell in the last two minutes of the ...

I knew that I loved this band the second I heard their song "Lost in my Mind"'s chorus. I also knew that they have their finger on the pulse of something beyond this life. I'm not sure they're overtly Christian, but their lyrics and the beautiful melodies they produce definitely point me heavenward. However, it wasn't until tonight, seeing them live, that I really got what a journey of redemption their eponymous album of 2011 is. If played in order, you get three very distinctive sections that tell the story of the saving of a soul, simply, in a straightforward and earthy way. The lyrics I have extracted here show three clear stages - 1) The Fall 2) The Redirect 3) The Move In Part 1 - The Fall 1. Cats and Dogs : "Fallin' from the sky There are raindrops in my eyes And my thoughts are diggin' in the backyard My roots have grown but I don't know where they are" 2. Coeur d'Alene: "What will become of these g...