Shortly after rebooting Youth Lagoon, Trevor Powers found himself in his parents’ basement. Searching for an old harmonica, he instead stumbled upon a box of home videos documenting his childhood. Sensing something important in the innocent tapes of birthdays, bike rides and Easter egg hunts, he set to work clipping bits of sound from the videos and interspersing them with the songs he had been writing for Rarely Do I Dream, the fifth Youth Lagoon record and second since Powers returned to the moniker he had retired in 2016.
By sprinkling the sound of his earliest years across the album’s twelve songs, Powers unspools contrasting timelines against a rattle of robotic drum beats and grungy synths that career in and out of view. His home videos are filled with warmth and possibility, they play over darker coming of age stories of broken families, missed opportunities and drift. Drugs are often on the scene and induce existential ponderings on ‘Neighborhood Scene’, while a spoonful of morphine is preferred to heavenly help on ‘Lucy Takes a Picture’.
Powers narrates each story carefully, fully aware of the fragility of the lives he chronicles. On the first Youth Lagoon album, Hibernation, he sang in a crackled quaver, as if he didn’t want anyone to hear him behind the bedroom door he recorded behind. Here too his voice is hushed and world weary, jaded by the stories of lives that haven’t gone according to plan. Perhaps none more so than on ‘Seersucker’ where droplets of piano spill over the sound of a family coming apart. Powers chants “We’re doing alright, we’re doing alright”, but the mangled guitar riff suggests otherwise.
The woozy charm that oozes through the shaded vocals and the lulling chug of the record mean that some of its delightful intricacies can be missed without leaning in closely. There is the crunchy, rhythmic beat of ‘Parking Lot’ that sounds like an 8-bit blacksmith knocking metalwork into shape, the ghoulish tale of ‘Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)’ delivered with an urgency not seen elsewhere on the record and the jaunty, more cheery introductory notes of ‘Canary’.
Powers retired Youth Lagoon in 2016 because he deemed that the project had become too restrictive and no longer represented who he was. While recovering from a harrowing illness that left him temporarily without the use of his vocal chords, his perspective changed. In 2023, Youth Lagoon once again became a vessel for his music. On Rarely Do I Dream’s final song, ‘Home Movies (1989 – 1993)’, where recordings of his childhood play uninterrupted, someone says “This is Trevor’s Story”, and we can be thankful he continues to write it.
