Get The New East India Youth Record
I am wary of isolating any one track from this album because it contains so very many layers that a single song will only offer an incomplete picture of just what an astounding achievement the whole thing is, but I understand that you probably want to hear something before investigating further, so here is a song from East India Youth’s Culture of Volume. The whole thing is remarkable record made all the more impressive by how its seemingly incompatible pieces not only fit together, but both support and enhance their adjacent works. Alexis Petridis in the Guardian did a good job of describing just how well it all assembles:
[F]or all that you’re never quite certain what Culture of Volume is going to do next, it never sounds ragged or incoherent. Nor does it ever feel like the kind of exercise in smart-arsed affectation that enables people who like smart-arsed affectation in music to apply the prefix “meta” to it: behold my ingenious generic juxtapositions, everyone, aren’t I clever? Instead, it connects with listeners on a very basic, emotional level. It’s not just that the melody and lyrics of Carousel are really moving; it’s that the shift from the preceding track’s dancefloor euphoria to this song’s epic melancholy amplifies its effect.
The influences are all fairly obvious: Berlin-era Bowie, Scott Walker, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Neil Hannon, Pet Shop Boys, some Thomas Dolby — if those names put you off then I guess you should avoid, but otherwise I cannot urge you more strongly to give this one a series of repeated listens. It’s nice to know that records like this can be made.