Gray Gardens

Music as blue as the album’s cover. Like twilight, there’s a soft radiance in every dark corner. The voice dry as a rough red wine, bits of acoustic guitars, slide, twang and mallets all used sparingly. Ghostly keyboard sounds, like a flying curtain all over it. Poltergeist-drums; tick-tock percussion, like the sound from a broken grandfather clock, commemorating progressing time, just before or after witching hour. Lord Youth appears as a laconic master of imagination, of the blue hour. Every now and then, Lord Youth speeds up the pace, like the wake-up call start of ‘Plastic Bombs’, the sketchy garage noise of ‘Moonbelly’, or the rough Americana rock'n'roll of ‘What's That Sound’. Overall, this is a crystalline album permeated with undefined grief.