Youth Lagoon’s second effort doesn’t quite live up to the first
By Max Hill
Wondrous Bughouse, Trevor Powers’ second album under his Youth Lagoon moniker, marks a dramatic departure from his 2011 debut, The Year of Hibernation: where the former was intimate, tender and warm, Powers’ sophomore effort is ambitious, experimental and purposeful.
However, though Wondrous Bughouse is undoubtedly a capable effort from a talented young musician with patches of the brilliance his fans have come to anticipate, it fails to live up to the grandiose expectations set by its predecessor, substituting style for substance and performance for emotion.
The album starts off strong with the one-two punch “Through Mind and Back” and early single “Mute”. Reminiscent of Deerhunter and Mercury Rev, the tracks explore a more psychedelic sound with prominent vocals and live drums.
It should come as no surprise that the album was produced by Ben H. Allen, famous for his work with Animal Collective, Deerhunter and Washed Out. From its onset, Wondrous Bughouse takes a hazy and distant
tone, reminiscent of Allen’s previous work. His production elevates album highlights “Pelican Man” and “Third Dystopia”, which borrow from artists as varied as The Flaming Lips, Pink Floyd, The Beatles and Tame Impala while incorporating Youth Lagoon’s talent for hooks and straightforward melodies.
Powers’ vocal is also more prominent and confident here than in his previous work, lending the songs charisma and voice which was lacking from some of The Year of Hibernation’s more reserved and introverted tracks. At its best, Wondrous Bughouse shows an artist taking his best qualities and translating them into a more accessible, heterogeneously influenced style which stays true to his core sensibilities as a musician.
Sadly, this potentially great album is plagued by a variety of subpar efforts and a tendency to rehash song structures and lyrical themes. “Attic Doctor” is strange and carnivalesque (and not in a cool way); “Sleep Paralysis” meanders along without coming to any sort of apex; and album closer “Daisyphobia” sounds like a mediocre Animal Collective B-side, sauntering along fruitlessly for five minutes and ending the album in remarkably unspectacular fashion. These sporadically sup-par tracks give the album an uneven, spasmodic quality which keeps it from coalescing as a singular musical statement.
Powers also relies too heavily on a similar song structure — a hazy, quiet opening, standard verse-chorus-verse, psychedelic instrumental and stripped-down outro — which leaves some tracks feeling stale and rehashed. None of the songs here are bad by any means, but many seem borrowed from other, lesser albums and leave Wondrous Bughouse feeling like more of a compilation than a deliberate composition.
The pressure of following a successful debut surely wasn’t lost on Powers: Wondrous Bughouse feels like a measured and purposeful attempt to break away from The Year of Hibernation and tread new and inventive artistic ground. And in places, it works: there are enough great songs here to make an outstanding EP, and the under whelming nature of the album as a whole doesn’t detract from the quality of these standouts. But as an LP with a 50-minute-plus r untie, the album comes off feeling bloated, disjointed and ultimately unexceptional. Though Powers deserves note for making a conscious effort not to imitate his superb debut, Wondrous Bughouse sounds like the work of an artist who’s still looking for his own distinct voice, and going through the typical and altogether necessary growing pains that come with that process.
