A name like Young Jesus is either deadly earnest or a total piss-take. This record’s literally called S/T, a statement in itself as if to say, “Please do not call it “Young Jesus’ self-titled album.’” Its seven one-word song titles can be read as a strange poem and the last two of them take up over half of S/T’s 47-minute run time. The band is listed as “composers” in the credits. It comes not with a “RIYL” list but a reading syllabus. Their most prominent interview for this album cycle was done by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Young Jesus are not at all ashamed about the lengths they’ve gone to make a big ol’ piece of art, and it might be completely insufferable if S/T didn’t prove them to be acts of generosity that break down the boundary between the artist and listener—Young Jesus’ third album is not a conversation piece, but a dialogue meant to be shared.
This is an important distinction between S/T and their sorely, but understandably, overlooked previous work. 2015’s Grow/Decompose was hyperliterate, barfly talk-rock that recalled pickled lifers like the Hold Steady and Protomartyr, but it was also a concept album that explored spiritual and sexuality confusion and fluidity—that’s frontman John Rossiter dressed in drag on the cover. Reflecting the band’s transplantation from Chicago to Los Angeles, there wasn’t any of the jocular referentiality, Midwestern rumination, or classic rock poses that made those other bands such an easy sell to aging critics.
The authorial aims of S/T are no less ambitious: “There’s a theory I’ve got cooking/about the way the body moves,” Rossiter intones on “Desert,” but it’s more of an invitation to converse, not a lecture. Compared to the ripe prose of Grow/Decompose, S/T does a lot less talking with its economic poetry: “You are a room/If you want to settle down,” introduces “River,” a plea for reconciliation that reaches a crushing, predictable conclusion as Rossiter sings with faltering stoicism: “I guess I’ll see you around.” The 10 minutes of “Feeling” become intimidatingly literal, taking extended instrumental stretches to meditate on a single verse about the metaphysical sensation of feeling the feels. These are the rare moments of emotional brinksmanship on S/T, which is more interesting in exploring the life happening in between, perhaps inspired by Mount Eerie, a key passage finds Rossiter looking at crows and trying to divine meaning. Unlike Phil Elverum, he doesn’t just find it, but it’s one that makes him feel joyously overwhelmed by meaning (“I feel a fullness/feel entire moments always change”).
At times, this awareness becomes overwhelming in the opposite direction: “Every little landscape breaks my heart,” Rossiter muses on “Desert,” later screaming, “Every little landscape breaks apart” in desperation on “Storm.” Rossiter is always in touch with his surroundings throughout S/T, abetted by a shockingly stark recording; there’s almost nothing associated with production, almost no perceptible overdubs or even reverb, the ambience arid and alien like a desert in the winter night. Or, as Rossiter puts it in “Green,” “A stranger in a strangely intimate embrace.”
Freed from conventional post-punk, Young Jesus truly earn the title of “composers,” refashioning the tools of rock music as transportive devices: “Green” flows blissfully towards a coda of harmonic feedback, while “River” is an interstate heartbreak song, surveying scenes of nothing but cracked flatland and twisted metal. In its quiet moments—most of the time—S/T shares the same out-of-time, transportive, aural sandbox appeal of Young Team, Laughing Stock, Spiderland—a working title for “Eddy” could’ve been “Getting Stoned to Slint.”
As for side-long closer “Storm,” imagine Broken Social Scene’s ”It’s All Gonna Break” rewritten as a feverish drunkalogue. “Back in ‘95/Mom and dad were screaming/And you were leaning out the back door of your mind,” Rossiter shouts. It’s initially left to interpretation whether he’s an omnipotent narrator, but his role becomes more clear as “Storm” unfolds: “Ten years later at the Holiday Inn breakfast, I started crying...I called and said I’m sick/I inherited something I can’t deny,” to which that friend or brother or substitute father figure replies, “You gotta deal with it.” It traverses 12 years in as many minutes until it finds Rossiter back in the present, standing in his kitchen under the weight of it all. “Is this existing? I’m gonna make it work,” serves as the valedictory sendoff of S/T, but it sounds like they band is just getting started.
