Title:Colossal Youth By: Young Marble Giants Released by: Crepuscule Released on: 1980 (reissued 1994) Rating (out of 10): 8 Date: 06/28/2001
Minimal Giants of the New Wave
Young Marble Giants made marching music for amputated plastic soldier figurines—no—escape themes for hyperactive infants scratching at the vinyl siding of their high-walled cribs. No, not even. Young Marble Giants made spy songs for robot detectives.
The truth is, Young Marble Giants were a Cardiff, Wales trio who made one album, Colossal Youth, released in 1980 (and one subsequent EP, Test Card, which is tacked on to the end of the CD), and broke up shortly thereafter. They weren't met with much success, perhaps because writers had as much trouble describing YMG's approach to post-punk pop as I'm having right now.
Certain words come to mind: minimalist, twee, new wave. But those terms are catch-all critical crutches, and after checking out the blurbs included in the 1994 Crepuscule reissue of Colossal Youth ("The trio's songs lilt in a private sector like jiminy cricket in rock's watchpocket," writes Jon Pareles), I feel obliged to give this band a bit more.
How to construct a Young Marble Giant? Start with a slab of jerky, metronomic, octave-jumping bass. Start chiseling in time. Soon, every unnecessary piece of marble will fall away, and a face will begin to define itself—that of a giggly, bob-haired preppy schoolgirl. Give it hands, and six months of guitar lessons. Teach it to play Ventures covers without any shred of enthusiasm or human emotion—this is surf-rock for a waveless ocean. The detail of your Young Marble Giant won't rival anything of Michelangelo's—instead, it will resemble an average grammar-schooler's Arts & Crafts project, with broadly-defined features and grotesquely miscalculated proportions. Finally, take an old Farfisa organ and smash it over the head of your Young Marble Giant while humming Devo's "Snowball."
All of that out of the way, I'll say that Colossal Youth is one of the most adorable pieces of music I've ever heard. Alison Statton's voice sounds like it's passing secret notes in homeroom, hatching diabolical adolescent after-school plans. It's too smart for its own good, bemused by the way it perceives the world—sort of a cross between Linda Thompson and TV's Daria (with a British accent, of course). And the organ would be well-suited for the score of a drive-in sci-fi picture show—something with giant turtles and screaming women in paisley skirts, no doubt.
Most of the songs on Colossal Youth are the sole intellectual property of guitarist/organist Stuart Moxham, and his lyrics offset the cuteness of the tunes with bleak philosophical musings:
If you think the world is
a clutter of existence
Falling through the air
with minimal resistance
You could be right, how would I know?
Colossal youth is showing the way to go
—from "Colossal Youth"
But for all the bedsit-depression of the lyrics, they're just as spare and underwrought as the music is. That's a good thing—Colossal Youth is a quiet record, a meditation companion for consumptive, anorectic daydreamers with no natural light in their rooms. It's electronica for Nick Drake fans, more or less. "Gentle folk," as Moxham describes Young Marble Giants' fans in the CD's liner notes.
Go get Colossal Youth now. Jump a turnstile, hop a freight train, hang from the wings of a Lear jet, I don't care. This record is essential stuff, and you should be embarrassed for not owning it.
