- It must be hard enough keeping a four-piece band together, let alone the 11-member Young Echo, a rat's nest of group and solo projects with no clear hierarchy or centre. But the collective has managed it, and five years after its debut album, Nexus, this self-titled, self-released LP continues to strike a balance, as the crew puts it, between "individualism" and "a greater whole." Like the last album, it comes without artist credits, presenting the collective's scattered output as a unified body of work. Still, you can hear how recent Young Echo projects have shifted its centre of gravity.
"Never," for instance, sounds like the crackly loop tracks of O$VMV$M, the duo of Amos Childs (of Jabu and Zhou) and Sam Barrett (AKA Neek). Their Caretaker-in-dub sound returns on tracks like "Nothing" and "Home," which lock songbook ballad phrases in syrupy slow-mo. Elsewhere you get a whiff of the more pungent odours of the label Fuckpunk and the duo Asda. On "Rocksteady," Asda vocalist Chester Giles listlessly invites us to "come swing, come sway" under a hail of dolorous klaxons; "Psychology Of Destructed Cult Leaders" and "Oh, Won't You" are hyper-distorted drum assaults. This sound gets the last word, on "Wicked Ones," which could almost be a lost Downwards B-side, and sits awkwardly at the album's tail-end.
Voices gel together these sometimes contrasting styles. Most of the album's tracks frame a vocal of some sort. Jabu, who released an album of deep-blue soundsystem pop last year, are a strong presence: the group's Alex Rendall sings on the sepulchral "Stare" and "Oran," and Jasmine Butt, another Jabu member, on album highlights "Here," "Anye" and "Kidney Punch." Rider Shafique crowns the straightforwardly dubwise "Bigger Heads," and newcomer rapper Manonmars gets a few spots. Sometimes the spoken word stuff takes on a stilted American cadence—see Rendall, under his rap alias Bogues, pronouncing "wrath" with the "a" on "Wolfe," or the booming 808s of the Manonmars-featuring "Red Dot, Green Light."
But the album's deeper flaw is that no vocalist gets much space to work with. The mostly instrumental Nexus, which was more aligned with dance music, featured 13 fuller tracks. Young Echo feels like an oblique take on pop, but its 24 tracks often fail to break the three-minute mark. Ideas are picked up and restlessly discarded, making for a fractured and sometimes frustrating listening experience. Then again, getting 11 people to agree on a tracklist was surely no easy task.
Tracklist01. Never
02. Rocksteady
03. Sedated Private
04. Transmission 1
05. Psychology Of Destructive Cult Leaders
06. Hake
07. DominoCro
08. Bigger Heads
09. Here
10. Still Yours
11. Untitled
12. Wolfe
13. Anye
14. Stare
15. Oh, Won't You
16. Transmission 2
17. Red Dot, Green Light
18. Baron
19. Oran (Version)
20. Nothing
21. Home
22. Kidney Punch
23. Gridlock
24. Wicked Ones