Back in the 1990s, there was a particular male vocal style that pretty much ran shit in underground rock: A clenched, detached, sneery tough-guy sing-speak, a swaggering couldn't-care-less nasal honk that spoke to passivity and aggression in equal amounts. Girls Against Boys, Morphine, Urge Overkill-- these bands had little in common musically, but they all worked some variation on that particular vocal style. For whatever reason, it's gone almost extinct in indie rock over the past 10 years or so, but Young Widows frontman Evan Patterson is the rare guy who still sings that way. And for those of us who spent way too much time in our younger years devouring issues of Alternative Press and Magnet, that sort of voice is enough to bring back some powerful memories, regardless of what Patterson might actually be saying.
Ever since Young Widows rose from the ashes of the Louisville post-hardcore band Breather Resist in about 2006, most of their best moments have come from that sort of memory-shock: Oh yeah, this is how bands used to get shit done. Their rhythm section churns and sputters like pigfuck never went away. Patterson's guitar tone has a clangor that we don't hear too often anymore. The particular sort of tense groove that the band specializes in-- it's a relic of a bygone era. But after three albums of this stuff, Young Widows haven't really made much of an impression on their own. They sound dangerous, but it's danger by association.
The band's debut album, 2006's Settle Down City, remains their greatest moment-- a bracing blast of spilt-beer stink and ashtray grime. In and Out of Youth and Lightness finds the band switching up their style, stretching out into longer songs and going more for atmosphere than for brooding rock fury. At times, Patterson seems to strive for a certain Nick Cave depravity in his vocals and in his lyrics, and he never gets there. Some of his lyrics just sound silly: "Shakin' that fire in your fist. Shakin'! Shakin'!" The band used to keep a tight balance between tension and release, but moments of release rarely come on this album, and so the tension they work so hard to build never registers the same way. The album stretches nine songs over 48 minutes, and few of these songs needed to be as long as they are.
Still, these guys are all great musicians with serious chemistry and a strongly defined idea of what they want to be doing, so they can still conjure some serious intensity even when they're reaching for something that doesn't quite work for them. When Patterson stops singing and the band disappears into a gnarled, ugly groove, they become a potent force. And when they keep things hard and short, as on album standout "Future Heart", they still make a bluntly effective unit. Now that indie rock has moved on from these sorts of forbidding sounds, there's a hole out there that needs filling. And when the band really locks in, they fill it. Even if their whole style is essentially a throwback, there's plenty of room out there for throwback done right. But on too much of Youth and Lightness, they're not the machine they could be.
