Escape the Junkyard With Youth Lagoon.
Youth Lagoon in Montreal.
Shot and written by Eva Lynch
September 18, 2023
Montreal, QC @ Fairmount Theatre
If you’re like me, Youth Lagoon might have captured your heart way back in 2011, when you turned on the radio and heard the first few whimsical notes of “17” pour out into the car. The gentle vocals and soft ambient static in the background would flow into your ears, and feel like a retreat from the world.
It’s been over a decade since then, and Youth Lagoon still has an uncanny ability to draw you in and transport you somewhere new, that you want to become lost in. With intense rhythms and built up beats yet soft vocals. Their experimental sound has been dubbed ‘neo-psychedelia’ which blends lounge pop with a mixture of electronic and americana, to create a sound which is simultaneously comforting and unnerving. Their lyrics are often profoundly melancholic or lonesome, yet is contrasted by the way their melodies play with feeling both dreamy and desolate, distant and distorted. In every sense and at every stage, Youth Lagoon has managed to keep their ethereal and transportative quality.
Trevor Powers disbanded Youth Lagoon back in 2016, and many of us never envisioned being able to listen to more music by them or having the chance to see them live, which made their performance at Fairmount all the more special. Powers shut down Youth Lagoon saying he felt like he was in a chokehold, and despite it being his music, he felt lost. After spending time releasing music under his own name, having stepped away from the alias for a moment, Powers eventually made peace with himself and revived Youth Lagoon with the release of their latest album, Heaven is a Junkyard, released earlier this year in June.
The album and Powers’ desire to face the world and his mind again came out of a scary incident back in 2021, when a severe reaction to an over-the-counter medication left Powers barely able to speak, let alone sing, and led to him only being able to write with a pen and paper for months. Powers said that the experience changed his life, claiming “I’d been swallowing fear all my life and now here it was coming back up. I used to think God watches people suffer. Now I know She suffers with you. That changed everything.”
Youth Lagoon
While he recovered, he began to write about the world around him in Boise, which was somewhere he used to run from. He realized that the way to confront his new reality was by writing about it, and went through over three-album’s worth of drafts trying to distill something honest that captured his American experience and his experience growing up. The album reflects this time spent in Powers’ hometown, and the unpacking of what he’s always thought to be nothing more than a ‘junkyard.’ As he poetically puts, it’s “about all of us. It’s stories of brothers leaving for war, drunk fathers learning to hug, mothers falling in love, neighbors stealing mail, cowboys doing drugs, friends skipping school, me crying in the bathtub, dogs catching rabbits, and children playing in tall grass.”
As the crowd gathered to hear their long awaited return to the stage at Fairmont Theatre, and Their show at Fairmount Theatre was filled with ghostly and gauzy sounds, with haunted lyrics and soothing harmonies which filled the room. Powers has a commanding and calming presence, and along with his two band mates who alternated between the guitar and drums, created several powerful and stand out moments. There was a distinct energy shift between songs from their latest album and earlier music which allowed them to bring an enthusiasm or young spirit, leaning into rhythmic arrangements and graceful guitar solos and in almost a blend of Western sounds and punk sentiments. This range helped contrast the performance’s quieter songs, and provide the space for slower and heavier moments to resonate throughout the crowd.
The performance was a beautiful and thoughtful reintroduction to Youth Lagoon, filled with intention, and it was a joy to be able see their growth both personally and as a band over the past decade. Trevor Powers has a gift for creating these creative imaginaries and inviting you in, and I hope you are lucky enough to feel enveloped and whisked away by Youth Lagoon the same way I was.