These songs are a congregation, a gathering together - they start as one, Ben's voice solitary above a fingerpicked guitar or a drone, and they expand to include a whole calvary of others, then contract back down. This is the tension - the translation from one person, solitary, alone, to one member of a crowd, one voice in the choir, from one to one of. How goofy it is, really, to sing "Now I am alone / in the power zone" joined in perfect up-a-third harmony by your beautiful friend. You are not alone! The silhouette was an illusion, a trick of mixing, this whole time Dan and Nico were standing there in the motel room ready to rattle the jingle bells.
Five years after its release it is that feeling of togetherness - secular fellowship? - that marks Youth Pastoral. It's what the album offers best, the delightful sound of a group of people making music together. Which is especially poignant in the long tail of losing vocalist Devra Freelander, a talented sculptor, and beloved human who departed this plane the summer right before they finished the record. She's so alive and vital on this record - she smiled when she sang, you can hear it. Much has befallen the world in the interim, too - the somewhat uncharacteristically sold out Youth Pastoral release show at Union Pool happened in the period between the first identified case of COVID in the area and NYC's total shutdown in March of 2020. It was the one show that version of the band ever got to play. And as it became less and less possible to gather, these songs with their gang vocals and cacophonous, humanistic peaks sounded better and better - was this why the record got so much previously unprecedented attention? Why the first run of the LP has been sold out for years? There was a great shuffle, people moved, studios closed, we lost leases on practice spaces but - in the best possible way - this record endures.
But that's what the record came to mean upon release, what about its text? Time spent and once cherished in a Southern California Megachurch is, like, the root cause of Ben's whole thing, and on Youth Pastoral he can't quite figure out what it means to break up with God, to be perhaps alone in the cosmos - piano lessons with the choir accompanist, allowed to play bass in the youth group worship band at 13, still jonesing for that first high, channeling divinity into something that can be played on guitar or sung out en masse. You can hear it in the music - hymnic uplift, prayerful crescendos, synthesizer drones as organ, a group of people all singing around a shared microphone. It's also pretty directly captured in the lyrics, with many mentions of prayer. And in Ben's perspective, the Creator and the astounding, ego-nullifying California coastline are inexorably linked, they are one in the same - the Pacific Ocean was the sight of his baptism, gel in his hair, and braces on his teeth. And so we hear torch songs of youth and of the craggy, deafening cliffs, we feel the youth pastor's suntanned hand on our foreheads guiding us into the threatening brine, and off in the distance the Hare Krishnas of Laguna Beach chant ceaselessly, clanging metal over the sound of a harmonium.
Listen for the crash cymbals. When Dan lets them rip, that's your cue for catharsis, an indication that the band on record is running through a brick wall: the soaring, long-awaited chorus at the end of "1 of," the gang vocals cascading upwards on "shine a light," the messy food-fight maximum effort as "Straight Line" concludes, the jumbo splashes that push the "Oh my god!" saxophone mantra into menacing territory, the rollicking waves breaking of "Endless Bounty." Just as we alternate between individual and congregation, this album vacillates between soft and loud, doing both extremes in the great tradition of Yo La Tengo or Neil Young (sometimes this album is Crazy Horse, sometimes it's "Tell Me Why").
Lovingly reissued by Tiny Engines with bonuses and upgrades - new album art and packaging design by Alex Tatusian, a new vinyl master, and some never-before-heard demos and outtakes - Youth Pastoral now asks us the question more appropriately than ever before: are we alone? And are we, in fact, in the power zone?? And if so, would it be fair to then ask, am I your good boy??? Oh my god!
