Young People were Katie Eastburn, Jeff Rosenburg, and Jarrett Silberman. They made songs like few bands made songs. Young People created songs like some birds build nests: from diverse bits, jetsam, found materials. This kind of songwriting, I’ve realized lately, is the kind of songwriting I find the most thrilling—when a band or an artist is able to take components that, if presented to you individually, you would not acknowledge as likely candidates for a song, and by technique and talent and force of imagination, the band or artist turns those weird mismatched components into a singular, breathtaking song. Hop-skip-jump drumbeat. A downer of a guitar riff. A melody that feels like it could go anywhere at any moment. You hear “Ne’er Do Well” and “Collection” (below) and, if you’re like me, you think, how do these songs work? How can they compress so much energy and charisma into less than two minutes? Katie Eastburn singing, “See clouds burst in the sky/like I might/out in the desert,” with a wild slide guitar behind her is basically like “The Lightning Field” in song form.
“Collection” too, like “Ne’er Do Well” feels like the result of a challenge presented to the band: make a song from tremolo-picked guitar and bass that builds to a climax and then slams on the brakes. This is the first song I heard and loved by Young People. Katie Eastburn sings like she’s singing a protest song, like she’s pleading for something, or offering up a prayer. There’s nothing like the way she sings, “I wish my mind could/be sharper/instead of duller.” What a beautiful song.
Skull Sküll was Young People’s Jarrett Silberman and Liars’ Aaron Hemphill, who put out a handful of releases, mostly as CDRs. I learned about this band because of the great Hand Held Heart label, which put out a 12” from Skull Sküll in 2006 or ‘07, and I was intermittently emailing the label folks to ask them, feverishly and weirdly, about a rumored split EP of Doors covers from Liars and the Blood Brothers that they were supposedly releasing. That (possibly apocryphal) EP never came out, as far as I know, but I did learn about Skull Sküll from all my sweaty pestering, a band that existed, like various freak folk acts of that time, in the ephemeral realm of emailed mp3s, CDRs, and message board links.
“Count to One” is Skull Sküll’s only full-length album, and it’s an album of sculpted noise, feedback, guitar scratches, wayward signals, and pulsing static. “Count to One” is like a more tactile and earthbound “Sheer Hellish Miasma,” and you can imagine yourself in the space where these sounds are happening, feeling the waves of sound battering you. “Chanel No. 5” is a good sample of the album, it’s an exploration, it keeps moving, tunneling, burrowing, (moaning?), throbbing, shuddering. The last track on “Count to One,” “One Day at a Time,” is a little different—an hour-long piece of static, or near-static, or textured static. Like a more agitated version of Autechre’s “all end”, recorded 11 years earlier. Really cool to see this given a physical release by Helicopter.