Pitchfork评测Youth Lagoon新专Heaven is a Junkyard

Trevor Powers has long shown a penchant for reinvention, but his first album as Youth Lagoon in eight years feels like a homecoming; he’s never sounded so confident or at peace with himself.

特雷弗·鲍尔斯长期以来一直喜欢重塑，但他八年来作为Youth Laggon的第一张专辑感觉就像是返乡；他听起来从未如此自信或平静过。

Trevor Powers has reinvented himself with every release. Across his first three albums as Youth Lagoon, he moved from small-town innocence to cosmopolitan experimentalism and hip-hop low end, and on to a bellicose clarity born out of personal tragedy. Then, in dramatic terms, he ended the project. On his first album under his own name, he embraced jagged, industrial-noise dread; on the second, after a scary real-life panic attack, he disappeared almost completely into found-sound abstraction.

特雷弗·鲍尔斯每次发布都在重塑自己。在他作为Youth Lagoon的前三张专辑中，他从小镇的天真转向了国际的的实验主义和嘻哈的低质量，并在个人悲剧中产生了一种好斗的清晰的思路。然后，他戏剧性地结束了这个项目。在他以自己的名字发行的第一张专辑中，他拥抱了锯齿状的工业噪音;第二次，在经历了可怕的现实生活中的恐慌后，他几乎完全消失在了听觉的抽象中。

Through a dozen years of shifting sounds and trends, Powers has remained faithful to the fundamentals of chamber pop: tunes that stick in your head and arrangements grand enough to get lost in. Also key: his cryptic existential musings, which he delivers in a voice as high and craggy as the Idaho backcountry near his hometown, Boise. His first album under the Youth Lagoon alias in eight years, Heaven Is a Junkyard, channels those familiar qualities into a reinvention that feels like a homecoming. The old anxiety and morbid fascination remain, but Powers has never sounded so confident, so at peace within himself.

经过十几年变化的声音和趋势，Powers一直忠实于室内流行音乐的基本原理：停留在你脑海中的曲调和足以让你迷失的编排。同样关键的是：他神秘的存在主义的沉思，他发出的声音像他家乡博伊西附近的爱达荷州偏远地区一样高大而崎岖。他八年来以Youth Lagoon别名发行的第一张专辑《Heaven Is a Junkyard》，将这些熟悉的品质融入到感觉像返乡的重塑中。旧的焦虑和病态的魅力仍然存在，但Powers听起来从未如此自信，如此平静。

Powers has teamed up this time with producer Rodaidh McDonald, whose stately electronic flourishes for artists like Gil Scott-Heron and the xx are echoed here. They achieve a sound that feels at once lush and spacious; synths, lap steel, and unorthodox percussion adorn unhurried songs that revolve around Powers’ rickety piano and quavering vocals, now free of the foggy reverb that cloaked the earliest Youth Lagoon records, but sometimes digitally treated, in keeping with his later solo work. The lyrics are as elliptical as ever, with lurid glimpses of the hardboiled 1950s crime fiction Powers admires, but they also seem more grounded in his particular Mountain West setting and strict Christian upbringing. The resulting catharsis is less a primal scream than a prayerful revelation.

Powers这次与制作人Rodaidh McDonald合作，他为Gil Scott-Heron和xx等艺术家的庄严电子花样的方式在这里得到了回应。他们实现了一种既密集又宽敞的声音；合成器、大腿钢和非正统的打击乐装饰着震动的歌曲，这些歌曲围绕着Powers摇摇晃晃的钢琴和颤抖的人声，现在摆脱了掩盖了最早Youth Lagoon唱片的迷雾混响，但有时经过数字处理，与他后来的独奏作品保持一致。歌词一如既往地呈椭圆形，令人毛骨悚然地短暂的感受了20世纪50年代硬汉小说Powers所钦佩，但它们似乎也更基于他特殊的Mountain West环境和严格的基督教教养。由此产生的宣泄与其说是原始的尖叫，不如说是祈祷的真相。

Heaven Is a Junkyard follows another traumatic experience for Powers, an excruciating over-the-counter drug reaction that dragged on for eight months and temporarily robbed him of his voice. Late-album track “Trapeze Artist” addresses his recent plight with harrowing directness, but through indie pop so jubilant that by the time a guest choir sings, “Jesus, please take the pain,” it feels like a hallelujah. Lead single “Idaho Alien” paints a grim scene of self-harm that Powers acknowledges as his way of coping with feeling trapped in his own body during the illness, but its jaunty, observational air could fit anyone who feels out of place. The extraterrestrial theme seems especially apt for a singer whose ethereal vocals—once evoking Daniel Johnston, now and then verging on Jónsi—have always scanned as otherworldly.

《天堂是一个垃圾场》讲述了Powers的另一次创伤的经历，这是一种令人痛苦的非处方药物反应，持续了八个月，暂时剥夺了他的声音。后期专辑曲目《Trapeze Artist》以令人痛心的方式直接解决了他最近的困境，但通过独立流行音乐如此欢欣鼓舞，以至于当客串合唱团唱“Jesus，please take the pain”时，感觉就像赞颂上帝。主打单曲《Idaho Alien》描绘了一个残酷的自我伤害场景，Powers承认这是他在生病期间应对被困在自己身体里的感觉的方式，但其欢快的观察空气可能适合任何感到不合时宜的人。外星人的主题似乎特别适合一个歌手，他空灵的歌声——曾经唤起Daniel Johnston，现在接近Jónsi——总是被看作是超凡脱俗的。

Heaven Is a Junkyard powerfully conveys a sense of renewal. On serene opener “Rabbit,” between Alice in Wonderland references and intimations of violent conflict, he sings about “a 1980 Ford” like an older, wiser version of the kid on one of Youth Lagoon’s earliest songs who was “rolling up the windows of my ’96 Buick.” The type of vocal manipulation that Powers explored to menacing effect on 2018’s Mulberry Violence recurs toward the end of this album on “Mercury,” only here it’s for a cello-swept anthem that asks about (and sounds like) a heavenly glow.

Heaven is a Junkyard，有力地传达了一种精神重生的感觉。在宁静的开场曲《Rabbit》中，在《爱丽丝梦游仙境》的引用和暴力冲突的暗示之间，他唱着“ a 1980 Ford”，就像Youth Lagoons最早的一首歌中那个“rolling up the windows of my”的年纪更大、更明智的孩子。Powers探索的对2018年《Mulberry Violence》的威胁性影响的声乐操纵类型在《Mercury》这张专辑的结尾处反复出现，只是在这里，这是一首大提琴卷曲，期待（听起来像）天堂般的光芒。

At its best, Heaven Is a Junkyard is up there with anything in Youth Lagoon’s catalog. The radiant electronic pop of “Prizefighter,” which wouldn’t have been out of place on 2013’s Wondrous Bughouse, spins an engrossing family narrative drawn from Powers’ background as one of four homeschooled brothers; a line like, “Now all I want is fun,” hits different after a verse about a brother “who left for war with no goodbyes … ’cause he thought I’d see him cry.” The album’s centerpiece, “The Sling,” which features prolific violinist Rob Moose, feels like a breakthrough. Powers’ lyrics are terse but packed with arresting phrases—“Time would bend/Like a drunken tree,” he sings—en route to an eerie yet tender declaration: “Heaven is a junkyard/And it’s my home.” Like a contemporary Huck Finn, Powers’ narrator seeks a salvation that lies beyond what traditionalist authorities preach.

在最好的的情况下，Heaven Is a Junkyard上面有Youth Lagoon目录中的任何内容。《Prizefighter》的光芒四射的电子流行音乐在2013年的《Wondrous Bughouse》中不会不合时宜，它从Powers作为四位在家上学的兄弟之一的背景中编织出引人入胜的家庭叙事；像“现在我想要的就是乐趣”这样的台词，在一首关于一个兄弟“没有告别就去打仗......因为他以为我会看到他哭泣”这张专辑的核心作品《The Sling》以高产的小提琴家Rob Moose为特色，感觉就像一个重大进展。Powers的歌词简洁，但充满了引人入胜的短语——“时间会弯曲/像一棵醉酒的树，”他唱道——在通往一个阴森而温柔的宣言的途中：“Heaven is a junkyard/And it’s my home。”像当代的Huck Finn一样，Powers的叙述者寻求超越传统主义权威所宣扬的救赎。

To acknowledge that flawed human beings living in the fucked-up here and now are capable of beauty and goodness may be a useful corrective to reflexive disillusionment, but it’s no guarantee of happiness. “Love is the promise that someday you’ll lose,” Powers sings with devastating certainty on the graceful finale, “Helicopter Toy.” With Heaven Is a Junkyard, he seems to have found himself anew by doing what he has always done, pursuing his musical curiosity in previously unexplored directions. On one of his earliest and most enduring songs, “17,” from 2011’s The Year of Hibernation, he sang of his mom telling him, “Don’t stop imagining/The day that you do is the day that you die.” Youth Lagoon lives.

承认现在生活在困境中的有缺陷的人类能够拥有美丽和善良，这可能是对反射性幻灭的有用纠正，但不能保证幸福。“爱是总有一天你会失去的承诺，”Powers在优雅的结局《Helicopter Toy》中以毁灭性的确定性歌唱道。在《Heaven is a Junkyard》中，他似乎重新找到了自己，做了他一直做的事情，在以前未探索的方向上追求他的音乐好奇心。在他最早和最持久的歌曲之一《17》中，来自2011年的《The Year of Hibernation》，他唱着他妈妈的歌告诉他：“不要停止想象/你做的那一天就是你死的那一天。”是Youth Lagoons的生命