Anyone who has read many of my reviews will know that one sure fire way to get your release a headstart is to be impressive with your packaging. Youth Pictures Of Florence (hereon known as YPOFH) go all out with their new double disc album, packaging it in a fairly exquisite, 15x22cm hardback book of illustration. And the imagery is wonderful, a mix of washed out photography, enigmatic pencil drawing and surreal collage. My copy came with a green cover, but you can also have it in red, white or grey, depending on your preference. The credits don’t give any information on who the artist(s) might be, so my guess is that they’re the work of the band members themselves. Whatever, it’s pretty much worth the price of admission for the book alone.
So what about the music? Well, the two discs are titled ‘Puzzle’ and ‘Detective’ and there isn’t any significant difference in the types of sound between the two so, I assume, the split is intended to work in a similar fashion to having to flip over a piece of vinyl – it breaks the experience up into two discreet, shorter periods, in this case just over 30 minutes each. As a general description, YPOFH make a form of post-rock. It doesn’t aim for quite the same glacial grandeur of some of their Scandinavian counterparts (YPOFH themselves are Norwegian), but the mix of intertwined, twinkling guitar arpeggios, violin textures and constant build and fall of dynamics within a mid-tempo rock framework is reasonably common in the contemporary musical landscape. Small fragments of electronic processing pop up here and there, and the vocals remain understated throughout. There’s an intimacy to much of their playing that is often missing in bands seeking scale for its own sake. Sometimes, there’s a melancholy and the mix of sounds reminds me greatly of immediate-post-Syd-Barrett Pink Floyd. At others, the references are much more contemporary. The tracks, none shorter than 5 minutes and many pushing or even exceeding 10, meander and shift through multiple moods.
Post-rock has really reached saturation levels over the last few years. However, YPOFH do enough with their noodling to not disappear into the background. And, to return to where we started, there is the book. The book is actually what is going to keep this album in my collection, but in the knowledge that there’s a reasonably good album tucked into its pages. With that knowledge, I’m more likely to give this repeated plays which will allow a stronger relationship with the music. My assumption is that this will result in a growing appreciation. It’s not judging a book by its cover, but it’s definitely a case of the book being the selling point to warrant giving more time and a sympathetic ear to the music.
Adrian Elmer
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