Breakup albums leave their creator in the awkward, ironic position of putting the source of their pain on a pedestal. The greater the heartbreak, the greater the catharsis, and all of it—the self-examination, the inventory of shortcomings, the mourning, the acceptance, the hope—is contingent on understanding why someone willingly invested so much in a relationship in the first place. There’s a fairly traditional story of codependence couched within Youth Pastoral, but it’s secondary to Ben Seretan’s larger reckoning of his break from evangelical Christianity, a lifestyle that guides every moment of a person’s life and leaves a gaping void when it’s gone. More than a simple breakup album, Youth Pastoral fits into a small ex-religious subgenre typified by the Heathen podcast, Jamie Lee Finch’s book You Are Your Own, and David Bazan’s Strange Negotiations documentary. You can’t just go on Tinder and find a rebound spirituality.
A traditional, solo-credited singer-songwriter album wasn’t necessarily a given for Seretan. After years of personal upheaval following the release of 2016’s Bowl of Plums, Seretan bounced back with My Life’s Work, a 24-hour, 48-track collection of vividly titled ambient pieces (“Stoned and Slackjawed Under the Ferris Wheel,” “I Want to Taste the Pondwater on You”). His writing on Youth Pastoral doesn’t mimic the breathless essays that accompanied My Life’s Work, which captured a man trying to make up for an entire circumspect youth in a couple of years. But he does capture the spirit of self-rediscovery: “Filled to the brim with something fine, one spark and I’ll explode,” he coos in the first line.
Throughout Youth Pastoral, Seretan recognizes the conflation of profane and sacred desires that turned lovers into gods and vice versa. His confessions (“I remade myself to your taste,” “I’m your good boy, am I your good boy?”) are intentionally open-ended, speaking in overtly religious terms of surrender and supplication. No longer willing to make a single entity his higher power, Seretan finds salvation in community and earthly, platonic friendship. His vulnerable, keening voice is the primary emotional vessel on Youth Pastoral, but not its only one: Devra Freelander, a multimedia artist who was tragically killed before the album’s release, provides harmony vocals throughout.
The core of the new album is similar to that of Bowl of Plums or Seretan’s self-titled debut: full of variously wooly and weary songs with freak-folk melodies vining over gnarled, knuckled guitar, as if Devendra Banhart and Mark Kozelek had become drinking buddies for a spell in 2003. Abetted by more than a dozen contributors adding heraldic horns, trilling flutes, and theater-troupe harmonies, Youth Pastoral hews towards the potluck folk of the mid-’00s, dabbling in stoned soft-rock, Laurel Canyon revivalism, and an avowed psychic connection to Phantom Planet.
Seretan doesn’t set out to completely negate his evangelical upbringing; in Youth Pastoral’s most captivating moments, he seems to honor it. In the album’s pivotal scene, he’s baptized in the Pacific Ocean as a teen, and much of the record sounds as if it’s been exfoliated by a sea salt bath. The insistent ticking of cymbals on “1 Of” and “Holding Up the Sun” evoke a state of weightlessness, as if anticipating the same release from inhibitions typically associated with religious transformation. “Everything’s gonna be alright/You shine a little light for me… Shine a light!” Seretan screams towards the end of “Holding Up the Sun,” and whether the mimicry of a praise chorus is meant as homage or sarcasm, it doesn’t really matter. Seretan once found purpose in fundamentalism. Now he’s found freedom in the realization that heaven is what you make it.
