Monday, December 12, 2011

Young Widows Are In and Out of Youth and Lightness


For having just recorded three albums, Kentucky’s own Young Windows have come a long way in a short period of time. This is a band that took their urgent and dirty sound from their debut and transformed it into a lethal machine of sonic destruction on their last album, Old Wounds, and has refined it to deadly perfection on these nine buckshots of post grunge Armageddon called, In and Out Of Youth and Lightness.

Easily described as the sound the world will make when it all comes to a close, this is like listening to an old Godflesh record, Bleach era Nirvana, and the Jesus Lizard all at the same time in the same set of headphones. While their previous album may have sounded chaotic and slightly rough, In and Out Of Youth and Lightness sounds as sharp and as deadly as a two handed sword. This is an amazing feat considering that In and Out Of Youth and Lightness slowly ploughs its way through each of the songs here. This is an epic record of discord, pain and misery, but boy this kind of heaviness has never sounded so good.

Each of the nine songs here are essentially the sound of an eighteen wheeler chugging away at a 110 mph in an attempt to crush your puny Toyota Prius. In other words, In and Out Of Youth and Lightness is ridiculously heavy and brutal and will pretty much test the pain tolerance of you and your stereo. Should you manage to survive the Young Widows experience you might just be rewarded by the band? This is a band that has no problems de-tuning guitars, cranking out grooves, and letting riffs expand to the size of the galaxy in an attempt to bring you to your knees and beg for mercy.

While grunge may have been dead and buried for well over a decade, it's nice to see that a few bands still feel like kicking the corpse of it around now and again and taking the sound that sold a million Doc Marten's back to its roots. The Young Widows have done an exceptional job of that on In and Out Of Youth and Lightness and while people often hate opening old wounds this is one that's certainly worth doing over and over again.

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