Scottish multi-instrumentalist Richard Youngs is a man whose career defies easy summary. Both as a solo artist and in collaboration with such like-minded cohorts as Simon Wickham-Smith and Acid Mothers Temple's Makoto Kawabata, the prolific Youngs has always made highly personalized music that forges improbable links between traditional folk, musique concrete and avant-garde electronic minimalism. His back catalog is a maze of lane changes and about-faces, so it should come as no surprise that River Through Howling Sky manages to simultaneously be a continuation of his past as well as a new departure.
This is Youngs' fifth solo release on Jagjaguwar in five years, and it finds him turning away from the fingerpicked acoustic guitars and pastoral folk melodies that helped leaven the experimentation of 2002's May and 2003's Airs of the Ear. Instead, Youngs casts the listener into a vast, inhospitable landscape here, occupied by little but his keening voice, violent stabs of electric guitar, and tottering percussion that follows along reluctantly behind him like a thirsty burro. This skeletal mixture combined with his almost ritualistic use of repetition and epic song lengths make this perhaps the most intense, comfortless work of his career.
His guitar is the most immediately arresting element of "Fountain of Light", the 8-minute opening track that quickly establishes the album's parameters. Utilizing a torrent of piercing, boundlessly sustained single notes, Youngs' playing here is highly reminiscent of Moonyean-era Loren MazzaCane Connors. Like Connors, Youngs is able to conjure up a universe of solitary desperation with incredible efficiency, sending wave after wave of distressed pleas skyward like signal flares.
This guitar onslaught stands in jarring contrast to Youngs' vocals. His voice is as pure and sweet as a field of Highland clover, and in the past he has (at least occasionally) used it on the type of tunes that you might expect to hear hummed by a shepherd. But on River Through Howling Sky, his vocals are unmoored and wandering, following the open-ended melodic structures of songs like "Blossom" or the marathon "Red Cloud Singular" up countless false peaks and through endless blind canyons. When on the latter he gradually intones, "I see a river/ I see where it flows/ I see infinity," it's with a sense of impending mortality rather than joyful discovery, especially with those ominous guitar thunderheads looming above him.
Listening to River Through Howling Sky straight through in its entirety can be an exhausting experience, but if one approaches it in the proper frame of mind, it can also be a rewarding one. It's certainly not the record to put on if you're in the mood for pure entertainment, but if you're a listener who enjoys the occasional glimpse of a talented artist doing some strenuous off-map spiritual exploring, Youngs has again outfitted you for an adventure. And it's an expedition made even more harrowing when you realize that your guide has no more idea where he's going than you do.
