Youngsville casts a definitive overlay of human growth set against the illusion of identity.
A cosmic dusty road trip of fallacies, death, disappearing community, and warped sense of familiarity.
Famed time travelers return from galactic domination to find their heritage buried beneath an empty parking lot of forgotten promises and maddening disappointment; the trouble with expectation and attachment within the human psyche and the *gasp* society that facilitates it. Standing in the plaza of nothingness, deflated and vexed, hope exhaled from the very lungs that once celebrated vitality with reckless and drunken abandon within the confines of a parlor that no longer is.
Youngsville produced a mind-bending pop/rock album, set in both the human psyche and the misunderstood river valley of wayward inhabitants. Hometown Relics is a cynical and disturbing reality of individual growth while on a cerebral journey through reversal of time and the evolution of self.
Bolstered by a wide array of reminiscent and light-hearted musical tributes, Youngsville pays mad homage to an era that unironically envelopes the listener into a eery feeling of traveling back in time while moving existentially forward on their intergalactic and groovy journey of offbeat amusement. Wicked and chock full of commanding bass lines, trippy keys and dare I say, the perfect amount of electric guitar, inciting rhythms and magical bursts of seizing radiance, Hometown Relics is a sonic mind-trip, altered by a freak awakening, juxtaposed against a disappearing community of hope; the hands of time decomposing into the ether of loss and longing.
Growth is a bitch of a reality of being utterly invisible to the outside world, gobsmacked that once-trusted agents can no longer see the new version to celebrate their victories; an inevitable and necessary occurrence in one’s chapel perilous lest ye be flawless and full of coyote dung. Hometown Relics, dense with lyrical prowess and powerfully shocking outros, produced to captivate and bewilder while commanding a beacon of retro-future focus on the cosmic subject at all times, cleverly incorporates nuggets of ridiculousness into the mix of indie alternative pop rock, wildly capturing the current looseness and uncertainty of the times, laced with dainty borders of destruction and death, wrapped in a sopapilla of fully-functioning hypocrisy and whimsical irony.
The album, produced and mixed by experts of the prominent, conductive static charge that occupies the vast southwest frequencies through thin air, encourages pause and reflection, while highlighting a mild urgency to seek out blind spots in the distorted lens of reality and longing. Youngsville released a convincing musical realization our minds often create the carrot that endlessly dances just out of reach from our glazed eyes and illusive fingertips while the world burns around us.
A timeless, psycho-bender that eerily depicts time in seemingly reverse, while coyotes dance and circle their prey in the desert, yelping into the cold night air, celebrating the vitality of existing in the now, Hometown Relics reaches back while casting forward, cushioning the soul from whiplash of life’s apexes of distorted truths, misaligned realms, and marginalized existence.
Not only did Youngsville pull off a deeply personal and therapeutic tonic of music, but they did so with authentic New Mexican ingredients and soundscapes that inhabit the airwaves of their magical and often disheartening homeland. Hometown Relics is a fervorously formidable force, rightfully contradicting the natural and enchanting beauty of the environment while bathing in the manganese bath water of poverty, addiction, and senseless suffering. The album epitomizes the quirky love affair New Mexico has with rejecting growth in the name of tradition and familiarity.
The toe-stumping irony of Youngsville’s Hometown Relics, with the subtlety of a B-52 bomber landing in a brutal crosswind, blazingly cuts to the far-too-overlooked negative truth entrapment has on community and the absence of infrastructure to foster sustainable growth.
Youngsville effectively illustrated the essence of void.
Stringer.