Collarbones – Die Young (Two Bright Lakes/Remote Control)

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I’m very glad that Die Young doesn’t quite live up to the hype of its own promo bio. “… Yearning at the heart of adolescent experience … a tribute to the modern mythology of youthful desire … framed by a soundtrack of jilted R&B …” actually reads like a fairly good description of musical hell to me! I can hear where the description is coming from, but I’m happy to be able to say that the album has so much more depth and interest than that.

I was quite enamoured of the duo’s debut album and its abstract, cut-up æsthetic. Die Young is definitely a continuation of the sound but with a few notable developments. While Iconography was an exploration of style, Marcus Whale and Travis Cook trying to find out what it actually was, this music they constructed together hundreds of kilometres apart, Die Young shows which bits they thought were most successful. They’ve ramped those aspects up and made a much more focused, less sprawling, but equally successful album.

The first major development is that, while the debut contained a handful of pop moments amongst the haze of its experimentalism, Die Young sees every track (with the exception of ‘Soul Hologram’ which opts for vocal wails and cut-ups rather than lyrics) trade in the art of memorable melody. At heart, this is a collection of songs in the traditional sense. And the hooks are undeniable. In this regard, the highlights are tracks such as ‘Too Much’, ‘Missing’, ‘Teenage Dream’ and ‘Losing’. But even the darker, less immediate tracks throw up lines which burrow in.

To accompany this, Whale’s vocals have taken on a slightly different sheen. Less submerged in the sonic landscapes, a surer, more confident voice can be heard. And the echoes of legendary forebears in his vocal timbre are telling. The most clear influence to my ears is Prince. But there are shades of Sly Stone in some of the more melancholy moments. Lyrically is where the largest shifts have taken place. Where Iconography was haiku-like in the obtuse, impressionistic briefness of its lyrics, many moments on Die Young feel almost abrupt in their directness – “All my days spent waiting/Nights I’ve been craving/All those other boys you’re wasting/’Cause you know I’ll be there for you” being the most obvious example in a pop-perfect moment of ‘Teenage Dream’. And here is where the Prince and Stone references seem most important. Even at his horniest, Prince’s lyrics were always imbued with a greater, almost spiritual, depth. Here, opening track ‘Hypothermia’ allows “Too cold to see the way/Simplified into lines/lover draw out my veins/I’m just your skin revised” – I can’t imagine too many mainstream pop artists getting quite that metaphorical.

Without wishing to harp on it too much, the Prince/Sly connection comes through for me in the overall mood of the album. Not that this actually sounds anything like either of them (vocal timbres aside). But both of those presented sexual/spiritual subject matter openly in the context of jaw-dropping, forward thinking production. And Die Young is just that. For all the discussion of lyrical and structural changes, the actual music is astounding, intricately programmed beauty and is the real highlight of the album. The hum of hard drives forms a dark ambient backdrop to trickles of electricity and subsonic booms. Hazy stutters juxtapose with hand claps reverberating from distant canyons. Yes, there is a contemporary r’n’b feel to many of the rhythms, but that description would be a straightjacket compared to what is actually taking place here, which is far more expansive.

Barely into their 20s, Cook and Whale have passed over that ‘difficult second album’ with barely a sideways glance and now already possess a back catalogue of depth. Bring on the next installment.

Adrian Elmer

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Adrian Elmer is a visual artist, graphic designer, label owner, musician, footballer, subbuteo nerd and art teacher, who also loves listening to music. He prefers his own biases to be evident in his review writing because, let's face it, he can't really be objective.

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