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Young Coyotes - "Momentary Drowning"
If home is where we rest our heads, raise our feet to the furniture, relish in the release from our day jobs and public lives, then what of a home's basement? Maybe it holds a bedroom or a game room--it is a subterranean retreat. Or does it slosh with the sounds of pipes, noisy with the clutter of hidden things the company will never see? Whether a secluded tuckaway or a mysterious dark, the basement is still that hidden depth unseen to the outside world. There, we stand in the foundation that ties house to earth, floor beneath floor, story sub story.
This is the curious sound Young Coyotes capture in five songs on Basement, laid down in a friend's home studio. It's peculiar that the band would go lo-fi for this project, especially since they released their traditionally produced Exhale EP on the same day. But on this record, it's the rough and bare that delivers their unique sound--not underdeveloped but full of life in its own state.
The duo uses a modest set-up: an acoustic guitar, a drum set, the occasional glockenspiel, and their semi-melodic voices. And they make good use of some basic pop concepts: simple song structures and straightforward, hooky choruses, sort of like a slowed-down, laid-back pop punk song. It's a dirty-sounding, pure-feeling appeal to some quieted part of ourselves that prefers tribal-esque bass drum thumps to suits and ties, half-howls and scatting to assembly lines. The opener "Momentary Drowning" feeds largely from a steady drum pulse, an almost ceremonial chant, and a single, fleshy acoustic chord, heavy-strummed. Zach Tipton described the song to Daytrotter as "the simplest song (to play) of all time," sprung from a sleepy experiment with a guitar and a suitcase. It's actually baffling how well the band succeeds with such a slipshod conception, but in an era of overcomplicated overdubs, that simplicity is exactly what gives Young Coyotes so much appeal. Young Coyotes take to pop's primal seeds, strangely emerging with something unplaceable in category and memory and yet familiar enough to love.
For all the carefree catchiness of the music, though, the EP's lyrics play very comfortably with the dark. Thematically, songs sing some of the most cheerful proclamations of death, fury, and hell over dreamy doo-doo-doos. The EP's closer, "Splitting Prisms" is apocalyptic in the most pleasant way possible, watched through a dilation to the blinding light of splitting prisms "where the river drained and disappeared." And it ends the world--as well as the album--all in the chime of a glockenspiel. It's as if to blur the betterness of life over death, here over there.
The EP is a dip into the caverns of comfort and the comforts of the cave, an exploration of an old familiar dark that isn't ironic so much as it is bitterly, bluntly real. Intimate and stripped, Basement is what our homes and our music look like naked. And naked we all came.