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The Young Gods

  
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
22:18 / 11.10.06
Re-reading the Intersting Metal thread, I remember I promised to start a Young Gods thread, ooh, aeons ago now. So here it is.

Ah, the Young Gods. I remember the very late 80s, when even the mainstream music press was judging EVERYTHING on how much it sounded like the first Young Gods album. Reductive, yeah, but if you're gonna be like that, then The Young Gods is one of the few albums you could do it with, realistically.

Big slabs of sound. Big, BIG slabs of sound. With a guy shouting over the top. In French. Named after a Swans track, they really did get what Gira had been doing with music. And took it in a totally different direction. It would, for example, have been unthinkable for Swans to have covered Gary Glitter's Did You Miss Me?. But The Young Gods did, and lo, it was AWESOME. The whole album sounded like it was recorded on top of a mountain somewhere. By actual Gods.

Second album L'Eau Rouge was their biggie, really. They, like the almost-completely-different Jim Steinman, realised the connection between metal and Wagner. Without a guitarist between them, they produced one of the all-time greatest metal albums in the history of anything ever, with sampled riffs flying hither and yon like drunken Valkyries. Recorded SEVENTEEN FUCKING YEARS AGO now, it still sounds like it's from the future. Or the distant past. Or a different dimension. Or space. Or something. Possibly Switzerland- I've never been there, so I couldn't tell you, but I don't imagine it sounding much like this.

THEN, just when everyone had just about got a handle on what The Young Gods were all about... they released ...Play Kurt Weill. And it's not industrial metal versions of Weill songs either- they're all fairly distinctive takes, but they don't sound like what we were expecting the Gods to do. At all. Except that they all sound really... majestic, is probably the only word. Fucking blinding, really.

TV Sky came out just after I moved to London, and was the first time I ever saw them live. And by crikey, they were ace. A clutch of songs with one foot in the first Gulf War, and the other in Doorsy psychedelia, the whole thing came across as being like Apocalypse Now in space. The epic track Summer Eyes, with its Doors organ pieces and Franz's "I can fire... but I can't forget... America, America, your flowers need water" is simultaneously spine-chilling and exhilarating. And the live shows were amazing- drummer up front, keyboard player off to the side, and Franz Treichler jumping literally (well, okay, not literally) millions of feet in the air with every sampled guitar stab.

Only Heaven was kind of more of the same, but it's really grown on me over the years, though my inner purist is still less than impressed by the fact that there's real guitar on it, though I can forgive 'em when it sounds that good.

Second Nature... hmm. When I'm in the right mood it's ace... but The Young Gods embracing techno kind of robbed them of a lot of their uniqueness. Yeah, it's still TYG, and it's still an amazingly BIG sound, but it could comfortably fit on a shelf next to many other records. Which was what TYG were never like- there was nobody else who sounded like them. Even at their industrial metal peak, with TV Sky, they didn't actually sound even remotely like any other industrial metal band.

I've not heard Music For Artifical Clouds, though I'd like to- apparently it's fairly ambient, which sounds kind of a weird thing, but I imagine done very well. I hear they're supposed to be doing new stuff, too, and I am SO there for that.

Come on, Barbelith. Who loves The Young Gods, and why? Who hates The Young Gods, and, really, WHY???
 
 
Chiropteran
13:43 / 12.10.06
Argh, The Young Gods are too good for their thread to go uncommented-to, but I'm afraid I don't have much to add to Stoatie's introduction. I'm really only familiar with Play Kurt Weill, which is a fantastic album (actually, it was someone's - Stoatie's? - mention of PKW in the Gogol Bordello thread that inspired me to give it a listen). I do agree that there really isn't much that can stand alongside it, though - maybe Laibach at their best, and maaaybe a smattering of JG Thirlwell's output? The album does have the sense, throughout, of being - almost confrontationally - A Different Kind of Music.
 
 
Tsuga
14:27 / 12.10.06
The Young Gods are one of those bands that I always heard of but never actually heard (well, I probably have heard them at some point without knowing). I think part of it is due to being in the US, in the south, and back then I had to really search to find anything different from what was on the radio.
But that's a great post there, Stoats. I think it's all the better that I think that it's not even music I would love, but if I heard it I would understand exactly why you loved it, and could appreciate that. Of course, I'm withholding judgement, and I could be totally wrong. I'm going to dl something right now, just because I've gotta know after reading your post. So thanks.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
19:16 / 12.10.06
I like the Swans comparison. With both bands the point seemed to be make music that sounded Promethian, earth-shattering, classically epic - whereas the Swans were at least partly about toiling away deep in the bowels of the earth though, forging own impossibly heavy chains, the Young Gods were more in the business of destroying what held them down, stealing fire, leaping across the mountain tops, that kind of thing. In both cases, there seems to have been a deep seriousness about what they were up to, in a way that there wasn't about a lot of the left-field rock bands that were around at the time - in comparison, The Pixies, for example, sound like a skiffle group or something, in my humble.

(With apologies for the Sixth Form hyperbole, but I pretty much was in the Sixth Form when I started listening to this stuff, so, you know ...)

To take slight issue what what's otherwise a fine post though Stoat, I'm not sure I'd agree that The Young Gods were ever strictly speaking 'Metal,' though. Partly, this yer basic musical snobbery, in that I can't really bring myself to admit that anything I like falls into that category (Led Zep, for example are not Metal, Alice In Chains are not Metal, etc; I think I might even have tried to argue this about Megadeth once, for roughly five minutes, before deciding that Megadeth were actually bit silly,) but also, as with Hendrix, The Young Gods seem to have fallen into the Metal category subsequent to their major work almost by default, as a result of the efforts of their various immitators. There's a horrible line you could draw that leads from 'The Young Gods' to, say, Limp Biscuit's material, but I mean ... well I wouldn't want to do that. On the early Young Gods stuff, the 'anything goes as long as it flies' approach to samples was arguably just as important to the, erm, Dionysian spirit that crept into the UK dance scene in the early Nineties (people dancing around fires for days on end, trying to literally get out of themselves - this was about more than bottles of piss at the Reading festival, and even then they didn't get it quite right, and ... Ok, I'm making a fool of myself now.)

Anyway, geat band, whose work I must really look into again, once I get the record player fixed - I sit here listening to greatest hits compliations on CD at the moment, and it's not so good.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:10 / 13.10.06
Hmm, yeah, it's a bit reductive to call them a "metal band", but L'Eau Rouge is definitely a metal album, inasmuch as it's anything other than a Young Gods album.
 
 
Slate
05:37 / 14.02.07
I have L'Eau Rouge & T.V. Sky and have really enjoy them both throughout the years. I have always loved Industrial music, and count these guys in with Scorn and early Pitch Shifter and Libido Airbag but I would not call them a "Metal" band myself. I caught them live once and was quite impressed how layered their sound can be in a live setting with just 2 guys. I am really excited about their new album hitting the shelves around April/May. More details here.

I think they are crossing over into a more electronica sound than simply sampling guitar riffs and using a machine to play these back while a real drummer did the beats.
I'm looking forward to this release quite a bit, reminds me of the old days, waiting in anticipation for an act to hit the shelves... Nowdays I'm so far behind I have to wait to hear about acts I like that are already on the shelf.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
06:33 / 14.02.07
(Wrt the above post, must have been drunk/stoned, sorry, everyone.)
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
09:45 / 14.02.07
FUCKING YES!!!
 
 
Saveloy
10:57 / 14.02.07
Ooh, I fucking LOVED the Young Gods, and reckon Alex is spot on in his pissed-up, stoned, heroin-crazed post above, with the leaping about and the lightning bolts and that.

I loved the way they managed to be HUGE and bombastic and noisy without any of the macho "WE ARE HARD, RARRGGHH!" business that we associate with metal, or revelling in the grotesque, like yer Foetus's and other industrial types.

Anyone else prefer it when they sing in french, though? I hate myself for saying it, but the english lyrics make me cringe at times.
 
 
Mon Oncle Ignatius
15:22 / 14.02.07
I think they are crossing over into a more electronica sound

I'm sure they did that around 2000 on Second Nature, which was very unlikely to be mistaken for Metal and was far more influenced by Ambient Techno, as were their various solo/side projects around that time.

It'll be interesting to hear the new album though. Time to dig out the old ones again for a quick rehash.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
01:29 / 15.02.07
It would, for example, have been unthinkable for Swans to have covered Gary Glitter's Did You Miss Me?

Well now.

Is this necessarily true? I'm not familiar with the original, but, given recent, disatrous events, is there any band better placed in the world of music these days to re-imagine Glitter's work than The Swans?

'Leader Of The Pack' would be fantastic, for example.
 
 
Saveloy
11:12 / 23.05.07
I have the NEW The Young Gods album in my hot little hands.

I'll be giving it a full and proper listen this evening and will post thoughts later.

Just thought I'd say this now in the hope that it might prompt other TYG fans to rush out and get it.

Not listened to even a tiny spec of it yet but reviews have it pegged as a return to their earlier, heavier sound.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
14:08 / 23.05.07
I'm still hoping on a review copy, but if none is forthcoming I shall buy the little bugger with cash money. I must can has it.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
14:12 / 23.05.07
I believe Ognarud saw them the other night, too-

go on, dish the dirt, dude!
 
 
Mon Oncle Ignatius
16:11 / 23.05.07
They rocked.

The album rocks very hard, as it should, being produced by Roli Mosimann again.

YG played "Did You Miss Me?" at the end, which was very touching, espcially when they said "And we missed you too" to the crowd.
 
 
Saveloy
09:16 / 24.05.07
Hmm. After one listen I'm a bit disappointed. It sounds like someone said to them: "I really liked the pacey tracks from 'Only Heaven', do loads of them" and they did. Much of the time it sounds like they're following a formula, which wouldn't be so bad if they were taking things to extremes, greater heights etc, but they aren't. Only the last track - 'Point C'est Tout' - really stands out. Bum.
 
 
Mon Oncle Ignatius
16:58 / 25.05.07
I think the first listen of Super Ready/Fragmenté is always going to be disappointing, because it's not very likely that it's going to be as awesome as hearing L'Eau Rouge for the first time - if only because the template The Young Gods helped establish has become so familiar. What Super Ready/Fragmenté does though is sound just like them in full-on techno-rock opera mode, but with a little less variation than maybe was the case before - but there is variation in there, and I recommend sticking with it for the duration - in my estimation it's turned out to be a whole lot better than the last few albums.

My review of The Young Gods live at Dingwall's last week on Freq with a few pictures (click the thumbnails for larger versions).
 
  
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